On David to Cézanne @ AGNSW

Drawing is the genesis, the connective tissue and the human hand most clearly present in art. The naked line and the smear of graphite link us most closely to out prehistoric cave marking ancestors. Drawing is like song, it is primal and familiar even when it is sophisticated or novel. It's no wonder that we react so strongly to it. It is an expression of pure being, the visual manifestation of thought onto a surface, drawing is more like language than art. 'David to Cézanne' at the AGNSW, a collection of French nineteenth century drawings, takes an interesting period of mark making and makes it seem wholly new. The bookends of the period are the icy neo-classicism of David and the over-familiar world of later Impressionism. It strikes me that both have audience problems. David, Ingres and Delacroix trouble us, the scale and sheer painterly virtuosity seem strange to our eye today, whilst Cézanne, Monet and Degas are as familiar as our family's faces despite being part of the most radical artistic rupture of the last two hundred years (I would argue that the schisms of Abstraction, Surrealism and Conceptual Art are far less monumental precisely because of the scale and ambiton and context of the Impressionist project). The drawings of these artists, the thinking left behind, the preparation, the studies, offer an interesting way to approach then anew.

Scale is a the first thing that strikes us in the sensitively lit rooms. Drawing brings us into a direct human relationship with a work of art, even when the paintings we're familiar with are not huge their aura and reputations might be. Thus the big romantic gestures of Delacroix and the political geometries of David are made manageable. Seeing studies from the big academic painters like David, Ingres, Gericault and Delacroix is instructive. I don't imagine I'm alone in finding the early nineteenth century a period of French painting I find easier to admire than love. The paintings we know do feel like they're crying out for the electric jolt of the human. David's return to the classical is as much ideological as it is artistic, but he makes it hard to find a way in for humans. Banishing imperfection from society means removing asymmetry mess and clutter from art, the very things that we recognise as essentially human. It's hard to like let alone love. Unsurprisingly that sculptural regularity is here in the representations of Ingres too, although in paint it's more often hidden under folds and swatches of linen and silk.

More of a shock is to see the difference in the sketches of the two big name Romantic painters included, Gericault and Delacroix. The sublime volume of Delacroix is absent here and instead we see something quite static. His studies reveal a painter twisting figures into compositions, building up blocks of elements that will eventually create a structure. That's no surprise but what was was the lack of movement. When we move from an image like that of the 'Bucking Horse' even it seems static, the twist of the head like a the extreme twist of a Michelangelo torso. It feels more marble than flesh and I wonder if this accounts for the discomfort I feel with Delacroix: there's a lot going on but it never feels real.

On the other hand the sketches of Gericault capture sense of movement, anticipated or otherwise. 'The Murder of Fualdés' is like a slash of movement from left to right. The figures don't just claim blocks of space or twist in shows of heroic tension, rather they seem to propel the eye across the paper and in doing so create an illusion of energy. This makes for a much more vital scene than Delacroix achieves, the composition assists the narrative and everything else is subservient. Perhaps Delacroix suffers from a similar problem to David, in trying to capture the romantic spirit of the sublime he is in effect painting an ideology, making that feel human and authentic will always prove nigh on impossible. Gericault doesn't have that problem, narrative might be contrived but it is familiar and it taps into real emotions and responses.

Even when we move away from the big narratives it's easy to see something cinematic here. Before making that leap it's worth considering precisely what many of these drawings are for, they are studies or exploratory sketches for bigger works. That technical distinction ought not disqualify us from looking at them as sequential observations. Jean-Francois Millet's 'The Wool Carder', widely known in the form of an etching, is utterly extraordinary in this way. What we see on the paper is actually three images, the main picture of a statuesque woman at work grading wool, along side and over this are images of her hands and of her face. It is almost impossible to describe these without using the phrase 'close-ups' but as anachronistic as that is we can't help look at the woman, then at her face or her hands as if they had been intercut. Consciously or not Millet's shift from the general to the particular feels like a edited sequence from a film: A woman is at work, we cut to her calloused fingers teasing the wool and then to a close-up of her serene yet care-worn face. Of course it's illusory to look at Millet through the lens of cinematic editing but it makes the effect no less striking.

As so often happens in exhibitions that revisit French art of the Nineteenth Century the depth, breadth and power of the work that spiralled off of the Impressionist experiment is underlined. This is never unwelcome. Familiarity can lead us to take this extraordinary period for granted. Here charcoal and crayon are used to create an impression, a smear of sentiment, a dark smudge of intense feeling. The formal innovations of impressionism often focus on its relationship to colour, to its optical restlessness as it sought to capture ephemeral light on things. Seeing these monotone drawings reminds us that the medium and the paper have a creative relationship, the crayon itself is like a haze that allows us to see. This is beautifully illustrated in 'Woman on a Parapet' by Georges Seurat. Mist or smoke or twilight seems to coalesce into form, as a woman looks over a railing and into the distance. The only truly dark solid form is a pillar in the left foreground, it makes the woman's shape seem all the more fleeting. The image is like a rumour or a memory, she appears and yet she may be gone soon. The woman, the skeletal trees in the background and the spray of light are only just there, the marks that hint at them rubbed onto the grain of the paper. It's a simple image but it has a meditative effect, light marks on paper promise deep interior life.

Another image that stays once outside in the daylight is fully of burnt black dark. Albert Lebourg's 'The Artist's Wife and Mother-in-Law Sewing by Lamplight' captures the brilliantly mundane in a flash of dark. The two women sewing here are revealed only and precisely where the light of the lamp falls. That focal point of illumination is the the strange centre of the image, it sits centre, middle and front a white hot filament of chalk, it isolates essentials, hands and lips and eyes downcast in concentration and gives a domestic scene chiaroscuro drama. The act of looking into the dark of this picture has a deeply empathetic pull, to concentrate and pick out features is to sew in the smoky half light with all the care and concentration that requires. It is worth pausing here to remember that Impression grew from the roots put down by Realism and that the dignity of humble labour is often one of its most compelling subjects.

Without the necessity of monumental scale or the need for a brighter more varied palette many of these drawings find grace in their restraint. Drawn portraits can be a shift from painted convention. Often they are simply studies but this can give them the immediacy of photography as the artist seeks to capture posture and expression. This isn't to say that those are absent from their formal painted portraits simply that emphasis changes. The need to display clothing, the symbolic mise-en-scene and the attendant conventions, be they social realism or social status, in commissioned paintings changes the balance away from the minutiae of the sitter. The portraits here are interesting for their focus on the face. Ingres may have catalogued the French ruling class in it's Imperial splendour, laden in finery loaded with very specific meanings for sitters and viewers, but his drawings feel more psychologically compelling. The image of his wife here, only her face perfectly rendered in pencil, has the tenderness of the beloved and a sense of curious amusement that might never make its way into a formal portrait. In drawing artists appear to be seeking the essence and when this is human it's no surprise that we find these so moving.

The realism that demonstrates itself elsewhere as a documentary record of labours also forces itself out off of the paper in the strikingly modern portrait of the 'Head of a Woman' by Henri Lehmann. The crease of her brow and the straggle of hair is unusual enough but the kiss of red chalk on blue paper gives blood to the face and a light touch makes her fleshy rather than formal. As this is a sketch Lehmann isolates the face so that we can't see period context of clothing. This purely practical feature gives us a shiver of recognition one hundred and fifty years later, it allows us to look at a woman of our own time, someone thoughtful, perturbed, alerted. That surprising immediacy might be what makes this show so effective within its quite modest scope.

This is so far from a blockbuster, but that's not a criticism. Over the last year or so I find myself happily immersed in modest but thoughtful shows at the AGNSW. The pleasures are often cerebral and contemplative, beauty can be found in connections and in quiet pieces waiting to be considered quietly. The AGNSW has stumbled a little with its blockbusters (Rupert Bunny anyone?) but with shows like this it does something of far greater value than simply rolling out celebrity crowd pleasers. I'd love to see serious shows of Mantegna or Zurbaran or Cassatt or Sickert or Twombly (well I can hope) but in their absence I like this public service curating and look forward to more suprising gems.

On Biennale of Sydney: Video works @ The MCA

After my first visit to any of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney I'm relieved that it's hard to dismiss what I've seen so far as just another example of curatorial toss wrapped up in theory and radical chic. The signs weren't good though, the daft subtitle of the event "The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age" sounds like the worst sort of artwank, the taster show at the MCA 'We Call Them Pirates Out Here' is, for the most part, a collection of dismal pseudo-radical claptrap and 2008's Biennale 'Revolution: Forms That Turn' was so self regarding as to be parodic. So, it's fair to say that I hardly expected to be so excited by a number of works even before I'd finished with the Ground Floor. It's looking good.

Rather than take a venue by venue look at the work, or even a festival overview it strikes me that something more coherent might be said by looking at more or less natural groups of work. The MCA has a number of pieces I want to return to but on first view it was the range and quality of the video works in Circular Quay that impressed me.

In 'City Self Country Self' Rodney Graham has a made a strange circular narrative, set in what might be an early nineteenth century middle-European cathedral town, that isn't a million miles away in look or feel (it reminded me at least) to Herzog's 'Enigma of Kaspar Hauser'. In this costume piece two men in period costume one a bumpkin, the other a colourful dandy, walk around a town in a seemingly fixed orbit. The obvious surface message one can take as the climax arrives and the dandy's buckled show kicks the peasant's arse is one of the historical triumph of the bourgeoisie. That seems rather unsatisfying compared to What happens in the rest of the loop. This feels like a short film about time. Both characters bang out clockwork beat of footsteps on the cobbled streets, the dandy checks his watch, the yokel the clocktower and the circuit of the town's alleys might be a trip around the dial of a timepiece. Graham appears to be thinking about historical inevitability, about repetition and about the different relationship individuals and classes have historically had to time. It manages to funny, sweet and thought provoking, edited with a sure and metronomic hand.

Susan Hiller's black screen and subtitles are more poignant. 'The Last Silent Movie' is an installation across two rooms that is part elegy and part archaeology. In one room a black screen shows nothing but English subtitles whilst the soundtrack plays recordings of words and conversations in a range of indigenous languages and dialects from around the world, all at or close to extinction. In one sense this, if it alone composed the piece, would only be so effective. The loss of language is sad but the subtitles preserve meaning. For me the power of the piece is that it is composed with a second room in which are framed graphs of the sonic signatures of the spoken words. These look like death certificates for a language and remind us that something whole and integral to a people is being lost, rather than a quaint historical oddity. The loss of a voice is a terrible thing, and that innate knowledge helps make this work so poerful.

Of course it's not all good. Mark Wallinger's glib 'Hymn' serves to remind us of the inanity of so much BritArt (and if it doesn't go upstairs and look at the toss served up by the Chapman brothers) and in doing so at least gives us a sense of the high quality of some other works. If this is the artist as some kind of prankster it's lame stuff. Standing on a hill overlooking London, holding a ballon with (one assumes) his childhood image printed on it, the artist sucks in helium and recites a hymn. One can read into it a desire to return to youth, but that's it, no depth, no humanity. It's emblematic of nothing so much as the race for novelty and kitsch in a certain recent period in British art. It's long been my contention that art about art is pretty dull, art is interesting when it's about people, feelings, ideas and things. When it's about art it's not. Christian Jankowski goes to some lengths to prove this. His work is a mock documentary, or at least a montage of mock news footage, featuring pieces to camera where reporters pretend to cover the artist's psychic dilemma prior to the Biennale itself. It's wrapped in that self protecting suit of irony but that makes it no less dumb and self satisfied. A bad combination.

My admiration for Bill Viola remains undimmed and I smile inside when I know I'm going to see his work. Seeing 'Incarnation' this time I'm no less moved but feel a sense of over-familiarity with the tropes of falling water as a barrier between states of consciousness. This piece is typically slow and beautiful. Two naked figures gradually emerge behind a grey sheet of rain, perhaps a veil of tears or an amniotic fluid, they tentatively push at it, until a hand and then their bodies break through. They come out into light and colour and it is not a wholly happy incarnation. The trepidation, their vulnerability, their closeness reminds me of Masaccio's 'expulsion' but here uncertainty still reigns. Viola often captures something that is, literally, awful and sublime in our relation to life, here he does to, and I suppose if you do have a 'thing' it might as well be a great one.

Perhaps the most touching work from the videos here is by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. These simple video works show lareg reproduction of works by Manet, Millet and Van Gogh in Thai forests and rice fields. On the ground in front of each of them sit a group of Thai villagers, agricultural workers. Each projection simply records the villagers as they talk and laugh about the paintings. They laugh at nudity and the shape of Manet's sitters breasts, they assume Millet's gleaners must be searching for insects and they translate the images warmly and generously through the lens of their own experience. It would be an enormous mistake to think this was merely art about art, this is about much more, the dignity of real peasants in the face of romanticised historical agrarians and the tenuous nature of meaning. More interesting still is that despite the cross cultural and historical confusion they continue to be interested to seek to understand, as they talk they begin to empathise, to create sympathetic narratives. It really is a work worth sitting with.

This felt like a good start for me and the Biennale this year. I'm sure this won't be the first time I dwell on the overall 'Distance' theme imposed on all of the work here. It seems to me a fairly typical contemporary art strapline, it seems clever at first but collapses under any kind of consideration that doesn't come from deep within the belly of the art world. Firstly I would challenge the statement that underpins it, that somehow 'distance' is a maligned force in Australia. That might be true of artists and other cultural cringers but I would place money on the fact that for many Australians distance is an unalloyed good (the insight comes from my 'non-ArtKritique' life and social attitudes research I've conducted), it leaves them with a sense of autonomy and freedom. That doesn't make the work or the Biennale bad, it just inconveniently points out that what might be beautiful would be a greater distance between the art world and its own navel.

On Dali @ NGV

Everyone knows something about Dali, melting watches, curly moustaches, pouting lipglossed sofas, if you're a discerning art lover .  The problem with Dali is that the critical backlash where he is portrayed as kitschy quasi-fascist self-publicist is every bit as simple minded and reductive as his own eccentric artistic genius schtick.  To simply come to Dali from either position leaves us at an impasse. 

In 'Salvador Dali:  Liquid Desire' the NGV has put on an amazing show.  This is the official version of Dali, the lenders are the Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali,the private foundation set up to promote and defend Dali's art and stature and the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, a museum built on the private collection of the Morse family.  That means you have a set of works with encyclopedic depth and breadth but none of the iconic works such as 'The Great Masturbator',  'The Persistence of Memory' or 'Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)' in Madrid, New York and Philadelphia respectively.  The show is quite brilliantly staged, from its neon signatures to black and red velvet rooms and a continuing ant and rhino motif (go and see, it's so much better than it can ever sound) and the curators should be applauded and awarded.

'Soft Self Portrait with Grilled Bacon' might limply straddle the two conventional views of Dali.  Here he is deflated, hollowed out, an artist held up by nothing but the crutches of his artifice.  Dali as his own subject and object.  At the same time he's the realist surrealist, the creator of images that burn into the brain and make the skin crawl, the artist of universal neuroses.  It is interesting to think that Dali is so derided for a his self-obsession, a trait that found him a perfect marriage partner not in Gala but in Freud, in a society as enamoured of its own image as ours.  This exhibition does pose questions about Dali's value to the past and present of art, it offers an opportunity to move away from the knee jerk reactions that began when his raised eyebrow so enraged the very serious abstract expressionists.  Dali's crimes against an art establishment so excited by its splashes of rebellious abstraction were manifold.  He had a sense of humour and he believed in figuration and classical technique.

As a student of art, who genuinely loved his many sources, Dali is much more than a pasticheur.  On arrival of America he attempts, through an exhibition to ignite a passion for the renaissance in his new American audience with riffs on Durer and Raphael, in a quest that might be on a little less fantastic than that of another of his subjects, Don Quixote.  His series of illustration to 'The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini' are appropriate, an artistic genius but a renaissance bastard Cellini's autobiography is ocassionally a work of ego-serving lies and exaggeration.  Dali's illustrations are both fantastical and sordid, the grip of his art sometimes loosening on the appeal of fantasy.  

Nothing here is a better example of how Dali understood the power art than 'Archaeological Reminiscence's of Millet's Angelus', one of a series of works where Dali explored one of the nineteenth century's most reproduced paintings.  Here the figure of the man and woman looking at their poor harvest and praying for better has been transformed into a pair of ruined steeples on a desert plain.  The melancholy sky and shadowed earth set the mood as a father and his son, tiny in the foreground, look on.  In Dali's universe the scene is turned into one of predatory sexuality, elsewhere the woman in a locust, here as culture crumbles it still leaves a long shadow.  You do not have to subscribe to Dali's personal mythology of sexual predation and initiation to feel certain resonances.

'The First Days of Spring' is there at the beginning of what we would recognise as archetypal Dali, a vast horizon lays out before us meeting a sapphire sky.  The landscape is a set of enormous steps that might be the base of some totalitarian edifice, a slash of classical linear perspective through the middle of the canvass.  Dali is dipping into his Freudian bag of symbols, in a combinaton of collage (photographs painted into the surface of the picture).  Father figures, men who might be fighting or fucking, fish and genitals are all part of this dreamscape and it feels much more like a psychoanalytic journal, than a work capable of communicating universal neuroses.  Dali's signature style, the vast fleshy forms, twisting, limp, deflated are what we know him best for.  There is a reason these are so powerful, like the works of the early expressionists they show a physical world transformed by inner trauma, but here the feeling of flesh and nerve endings is so palpable they are far more effective.

To look at Dali's career longitidunally you see an artist searching for a style, who finds a voice somewhere between Freudian symbology and soft figurative cubism.  As this voice becomes a patented style he continues searching for visual analogues for science and spiritualism, but never manages to find that visual bridge between the deeply personal and the universal again.  His art does touch on universality, his themes reach beyond personal neuroses when he finds archetypes for disgust, regret, absence and lust.  In one sense they are lessened when each image is so closely cross-referenced with Dali's biography, surrealism ought to be best understood at a sub-rational level, our eyes and gut are probably the best judge.

The NGV show puts Dali in his place, both historically and geographically, it is not irrelevant. The two influences that come out most clearly here are Giorgio de Chirico and El Greco.  De Chirico's classicism and architectural enigmas, are a clear visual precursor.  These imagined landscapes might be successor's to the 'memory palaces' created by renaissance humanists, mysteries and treasures lie hide within.  

The Spanish landscape of 'Cadaques From Creus Tower' might be a view of El Greco's Toledo.  More strikingly if we think of the way that El Greco took a leap out from Mannerism into a world of writhing, spectral spiritual energy rendered in colours we see something of a very Spanish Dali.  No less Spanish are the repetition of food, blood and shit, these are typically Catalan obsessions. it's when you force yourself to realise that Dali is a very Spanish painter that his work starts to make sense again and take shape beneath the blur of hype.

Later Dali does lose its way, there is no denying that.  His experimentation seems restless and gratuitous, his atomic period might be an isotope of analytical cubsim but there are still lines of continuity.  His masterful draughtsmanship and facility for realism are still important.  But at some point he starts to explore his own image rather than his own psyche, and this is where powerful slides into interesting which finally deflates into kitsch.  Celebrity navel gazing can never be as compelling as his relentless exploration the anxieties of our bodies and of occupying our own skin (which is what so many of his successors have failed equally to remember).  This is essentially why at least a significant amount of his work has proven to be so powerful and so many people while so much of surrealism, as an abstracted writerly movement, withered on the vine.

Dali's late re-embrace of Catholicism is the final straw for many of his critics.  He would never have been a saint in their eyes anyway.  Put together with the sympathy for Franco and we have an ideological bogeyman for latter day critics.  But the weird moral universe of the art world is illustrated by the avant garde saint André Breton's expulsion of Dali from the surrealist group.  Of course Dali's real sin was public ambition and cupidity, obscene wealth in artists ought to come in a hair shirt (if you're Picasso) or an ironic theoretical justification (if you're a Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons).  Creative rebellion tends to like conformity much more than it ever dares to admit.

Dali attempted to paint a new mythology for the century of the Self, he tried to capture the rift between a man's psyche and his physical environment and for a period that many artist's would kill for he succeeded brilliantly.  Art can never exculpate its creators of their crimes, but if we insist on the ethical and ideological purity of our artists we will find lots of empty picture hooks on museum walls.  This show might not make you love Dali the man but it ought to make you think again about Dali the painter.