- For a good account of what was disrupted and how, see M. Carter, ‘From the Red Centre to the Black Hole’, in André Frankovits (ed.), Seduced and Abandoned (The Baudrillard Scene), Stonemoss Services, Sydney, 1984, pp. 63–81.
- See I. Burn, Looking at Seeing & Reading, exhibition catalogue, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 1993; ‘Less is more, more or less’, Art and Australia, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 202–3.
- It is interesting that Burn does not explicitly criticize the Social History of Art for similar faults. This is no doubt due to the fact that certain aspects of his own formulations are more closely indebted to it. Instead the target appears to be the kind of semiotic-inspired theorizing that emphasizes the ‘reading’ of works as texts. Yet his critique and the ensuing analyses that stem from it cannot be explained away by a clash between, for example, historical materialist and poststructuralist theoretical presumptions. The question of seeing, especially in relation to language and interpretation, was a long-term interest; refer I. Burn and M. Ramsden, ‘The Role of Language’ (1968), in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, pp. 879–881. This essay also appears in I. Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1991, pp. 120–4.
- Of course, this suggestion does not mean collapsing the distinction between these two very different fields of activity either. In regard to continuing thematics, however, the artwork that comes to mind are the mirror pieces, the Looking at/through… works and Abstracts of Perception. Notes appended to such works in the catalogue, Minimal-Conceptual Work, draw out these concerns:
- Artists…are exploring language to provide an access to seeing. Such language, which was once ‘outside’ the work, is now ‘inside’ or within the activity… [Notes for Dialogue, 1968]
- or refer to the notes appended to Looking Through a Piece of Glass, 1967–8: …the apparent ‘coincidence’ of perception and language is used to expose the lack of coincidence, creating a self-conscious confusion of reading and perceiving (not reading) for the spectator. The seeing/reading processes identify themselves separately with the systems to which they belong. The effect of reading and seeing thus creates not order but disorder, a disorder of conceptual categories, a disorder in the experience of the spectator… [Now See Hear! catalogue, 1990, p. 209]
- Refer Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work 1965–1970, Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1992, pp. 90, 77. For an assessment of some of these themes in Burn's work, see Ann Stephen, ‘Making Origins Work’, Agenda, September 1994, pp. 14–15.
- I. Burn, ‘Is art history any use to artists?’, Dialogue, p. 4.
- This essay is drawn from, and develops upon, a series of previous engagements with Burn's work: ‘Ideology and Gumtrees: The Methodology of Ian Burn's Beating about the Bush…’, in T. Smith (ed.), Constructing the History of Australian Art: Eight Critiques, Power Institute Occasional Paper, no. 2, 1986, pp. 16–23; ‘An Australian Art: Why Necessary?’, Photofile, Autumn 1989, pp. 34–5; a review of Ian Burn's Dialogue, Agenda, 32, July 1993, pp. 23–4. My thanks go to Ann Stephen, Toni Ross and Keith Broadfoot for their helpful suggestions at various stages in the formulation of this essay.
- ‘The terror of not-reading seeing finds little redemption in either cloistered texts or spectacle alone. Only the recovery of perception in its critical capacity realises the visual density of art-making’; Burn, Looking At & Seeing & Reading, concluding sentences; see also Burn, ‘Is art history any use to artists?’, Dialogue, pp. 1–14. Also note his evaluation of Fred Williams: ‘Williams’ ambitions were complex, his pictures no less complex, and his art has the capacity to raise larger questions about the character (and theoretical framework) of Australian art’, Dialogue, p. 87.
- This point about the inherent theoretical-critical capacity of the work will be discussed further below—see the section tided ‘Dialogue’.
- G. Batchen, ‘Introduction: Pictography: The Art History Of Ian Burn’, ibid., pp. xi–xix.
- Another point could have been raised here. It is frequently argued that conceptual investigations generally forsake aesthetic considerations. Given Burn's artistic background in Conceptual Art, he would be automatically numbered among the anti-aesthetic contingent. The opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic is as perennial and yet also as complicated as that between reading and seeing. It, too, is another opposition that is not absolutely exclusive and should not be set in concrete. What one could assert about Burn is that a conceptual, anti-aesthetic rhetoric is readily apparent from time to time but it is far from clear whether conceptual considerations come at the expense of aesthetic ones. A further complicating factor is that Burn shares similar concerns with Yve-Alain Bois, particularly the idea of a ‘materialist formalism’. Bois, like Burn, disputes the ‘indiscriminate appeal to theory’ in art history but does so from a theoretically-attuned, neo-formalist perspective—see Y-A. Bois, Painting as Model, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990. Unfortunately, this issue of aesthetics cannot be adequately addressed here—it would require another essay specifically devoted to the topic.
- By explanatory depth, I do not mean the sheer number of books or essays published, nor the breadth of content examined. I am referring here to an account that also seeks to provide some coherent theoretical understanding of Australian art.
- An indication of the paucity of such interpretations can be gained from The Necessity of Australian Art in which the authors state that they will reassess ‘the major and influential interpretations of Australian art history’. By their count, this amounts to just three texts: William Moore's The Story of Australian Art (1934), Bernard Smith's Place, Taste and Tradition (1944) and his Australian Painting (1962/71) (since updated once more). Humphrey MacQueen's Black Swan of Trespass (1979) is also briefly considered; see I. Burn, N. Lendon, C. Merewhether & A. Stephen, The Necessity of Australian Art (An Essay about Interpretation), Power Publications, Sydney, 1988.
- The title of this essay obviously plays on the title of this latter publication just as it originally played on the title of Ernst Fischer's The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach, Verlag der Kunst, Dresden, 1959; trans. Anna Bostock, reprint Penguin, London, 1978.
- See the Burn lecture on landscape reprinted in this volume. Refer also I. Burn, ‘Popular landscape painting between the wars’, Dialogue, pp. 37–51; as well as his National Life and landscapes (Australian Painting 1900–1940), Bay Books, 1991; and A. McNamara, ‘An Infinity of Landscape: Representation and Transcendence in Australian Art’, in E. McDonald and J. Engberg (eds.), Binocular: Focusing, Writing, Vision, Contemporary Edition, Sydney, 1991, pp. 117–129.
- Hence the two critical moments of dissent for Smith: the appeal to realism as the favoured critical mode of the Popular Front during World War II and to the figurative expressionism of the Antipodean Manifesto, which was heralded as bulwark against a ‘mute’ abstraction in the late 1950s; see Burn et. al., The Necessity of Australian Art, esp. pp. 44–5.
- Although many of the criticisms of The Necessity were justified, much of the negative response simply emanated from the fact that authors dared to question Smith's presumptions. This alone indicates how far the theoretical debate in the analysis of Australian art has to go.
- Burn and Nigel Lendon explain this ‘discrepancy’, when discussing The Field exhibition, in terms of ‘cultural distancing’. This accounts for the fact that both the stylistic development to, and through, minimalism was not possible in the same way in Australia and ‘the illogical stylistic shifts undertaken subsequently by many of the artists’ in the aftermath of The Field. In New York, conflicts occurred between Greenbergian critics, alongside advocates of post- painterly abstraction, and Pop Art and then Minimalism. Burn and Lendon contend that ‘this conflict scarcely emerged in Australia. In The Field, both tendencies sat side by side, along with references to Constructivism, Bauhaus, 1930s abstraction, and even traces of Pop Art’, see their ‘Purity, Style, Amnesia’, Dialogue, pp. 97–99.
- This point could be extended further to suggest that what is lost in adopting this trajectory of stylistic development to account for Burn's own minimal and conceptual works is precisely the jumble of ‘local’ references—Nolan, Williams, Brack, the landscape genre; see G. Batchen, ‘Introduction’, Dialogue, pp. xiv–xv.
- ‘…we did not have to eliminate the distinctions between artist/critic, participant/beholder, theorist/practitioner. Such distinctions go on to make up the shape of culture. But for a time these distinctions collapsed. To work on paintings was to work on theory, to write essays was to make objects…’; cited in M. Baldwin & M. Ramsden, ‘On Art & Language’, Art & Text, 35, Summer 1990, pp. 27, 29. See also C. Harrison, Essays on Art and Language, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, p. 20.
- I. Burn, ‘Abstracts of Perception’, Flash Art, No. 143, November/December 1988, p. 109.
- Burn, cited in G. Batchen & H. Grace, ‘Situation-Identities: an interview with Ian Burn’, West, Vol.3, No.2, 1991, p. 26.
- ibid., p. 33; see also I. Burn, ‘The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath’, and ‘The Art Museum, more or less’, Dialogue, pp. 104–5 and 169 respectively.
- Cited in M. Baldwin & M. Ramsden, On Art & Language’, p. 27.
- I. Burn, ‘Abstracts of Perception’, p. 109.
- Batchen, in Dialogue, p. xvi.
- I would suggest that this oscillation between stances goes back a long way. In the article, ‘The Role of Language’ (1969 with Mel Ramsden), the authors propose the interconnection between seeing and language, the relativity of their relation and the possibility of establishing a seeing on the basis of ‘an appropriate language’; refer Art in Theory, pp. 879–881. These various, subtle switches of position prove central to later considerations of interpretation and criticism in relation to art history.
- In regard to this question of the cultural politics of the ‘centre’, see I. Burn, ‘Abstracts of Perception’, p. 109.; also I Burn, ‘Art is what we do, culture is what we do to other artists’, Dialogue, pp. 135–8 and T. Smith, ‘The Provincialism Problem’, Anything Goes (Art in Australia 1970–1980), ed. P. Taylor, Art & Text, Melbourne, 1984, pp. 46–53.
- Burn, ‘Beating about the Bush: The landscapes of the Heidelberg school’, Dialogue, pp. 19–36.
- Burn, ‘Popular landscape painting…’, ibid., p. 41.
- The exception for the authors being William Moore who ‘interpreted and assessed [Australian] art through the structure and values inherent in the regional consciousness’. Moore, for them, is exemplary in analyzing every aspect of Australian art—whether it be modernism, the art market or contemporary art—in relation to regional values, for he ‘recognized value in works of art insofar as they contributed to the enrichment of national themes’, Burn et. al., The Necessity of Australian Art, pp. 32–7.
- ibid., pp. 140–1.
- ibid., pp. 81–2.
- Paul Taylor, ‘Australian New Wave and the Second Degree’, Art & Text, 1, Autumn 1981, p. 24.
- I. Burn and N. Lendon, ‘Purity, style, amnesia’, Dialogue, p. 95.
- Burn not only proposes that an emphasis on contingency allows for a critical perspective in art, but that it also is one factor which separates work of the 1960s from 1960s-work-in-the-1990s:
- When I think about the differences…the first difference which comes to mind is the engagement with perception, with its problematic character, with the contingency of our seeing and with the development of strategies to make that contingency a self-conscious factor of our seeing.
- If contingency indicates a critical distance then Burn argues, along similar lines, that there can also be artwork which promotes bad readings of art (just like art history and criticism). Such work ‘treats the picture as nothing but a rhetorical surface’ by attempting to evacuate ‘visual paradoxes and conceptual ironies’ which means that:
- …many works of art today are conceived to be only read and are designed to function only as such surfaces. An analogy that keeps coming into my head is of a painting being designed like flypaper, grabbing at bits of text as they fly past; then someone comes along and writes about what has stuck to the flypaper but does not bother to look at the flypaper itself.
- Burn, ‘Less is more, more or less’, Art and Australia, Summer 1994, p. 203. For a reply which argues for a less faithful relation between art criticism and its objects, see R. Buder, ‘Textual Manoeuvres’, RealTime, 6, April-May 1995, p. 27. The next, concluding section of this essay looks at these issues in more depth.
- Batchen & Grace, ‘Situation-Identities: an interview with Ian Burn’, p. 28. For this reason, and others discussed above, Burn is here expressing his dismay over the decision to update Australian Painting thirty years later: ‘good for OUP, not for the good of Australian art’.
- ‘Namatjira's art is explicitly about contact (between cultures), of intersecting practices, and undermines ideas of easy assimilation. His achievement lay in appropriating a space of cultural practice for himself—and for subsequent Aboriginal artists—which allowed transgressions of cultural, racial and historical boundaries’; I. Burn and A. Stephen, ‘Namatjira's White Mask: A partial interpretation’, in J. Hardy, J.V.S. Megaw and M.R. Megaw (eds.), The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1992, p. 278. See also I. Burn and A. Stephen, ‘The transfiguration of Albert Namatjira’, Dialogue, pp. 52–66.
- The collaborative aspect to the notion of ‘dialogue’ should be noted. Perhaps the more obvious feature of this collaborative accent is the emphasis upon a dialogue in co-authorship. Examples of this practice abound in the collection, Dialogue which features many co-authored essays, and there is the example of the artwork with Mel Ramsden and Art & Language. This collaborative aspect, however, widens to encompass the idea of a collaboration between the viewer and the artwork, and between the local or regional and the metropolitan or international, refer G. Batchen, ‘Introduction’, Dialogue, p. xvi–ii. It is these two latter aspects that receive most attention here.
- ‘Is art history any use to artists?’, Dialogue, p. 14; see also ‘The re-appropriation of influence’, pp. 204–6, 215.
- ‘Glimpses: On peripheral vision’, ibid., p. 200.
- Burn, ‘The Metropolis is only Half the Horizon’, Boundary Rider (catalogue of the Biennale of Sydney), Biennale of Sydney/Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1992, pp. 29, 30.
- One wonders, however, what to make of the ‘bricolaged cultural practices’ that are apparent within modernism—perhaps since Manet. Could it not be argued that it is precisely these practices within modernism which have tended to be excluded from, or marginalized within, formalist histories of modern art?
- This indicates the point where Burn is both close and distant to the materialist formalism of Bois; refer YA. Bois, Painting as Model, p. xix.
- M. Ramsden and M. Baldwin, ‘Ian Burn: Looking at Seeing and Reading. A Reading’, supplement to Looking at Seeing & Reading, Monash University Gallery, April 1994.
- Burn, ‘Is art history any use to artists?’, pp. 6, 7.
- The term ‘reading’ (or ‘to read’) occurs so often in Dialogue that it deserves an index listing. An example of how the term is utilized in the manner I have suggested can be found in reference to Fred Williams:
- A reading of Williams’ pictures demands another perception of the Australian landscape. He is not just presenting a different subject-matter, or an approach to that subject-matter, but instead different conditions are demanded of the viewer in order to read the picture, (p. 91)
- And in relation to Nolan:
- At the beginning of this discussion, one of Nolan's Wimmera paintings was considered for its formal, spatial ‘logic’. This was then extended to a more a generalised reading of the picture's content, in order to illustrate the contradictory character of cultural developments in Australia, (pp. 83–4)
- Such appeals display the influence of aspects of phenomenology on minimalism and conceptualism. These aspects have subsequently been criticized by poststructuralism. Refer in this regard Rex Butler's characterization of the debate between Michael Fried and the Minimalists, and subsequently Conceptual Art: ‘…there is no possibility of a good gaze, an authentic, literal relationship to the work of art: the work as such is the loss of the gaze, of a literal relationship to the work. This is perhaps the real reason for the failure of the minimal/conceptual critique of art: it failed not because its politics were somehow wrong, but because the object of which it speaks—the gaze—literally does not exist, or exists only in phallic, institutional forms’, ‘Robert Hunter’ (review), Art & Text, 44, p. 75. Of course, it could be argued that Burn's later writings begin to address the limitations of the minimalist/conceptual ‘critique’. It is even possible to recognize a certain ambiguity of position regarding viewing and reading as he grapples with these issues.
- See P. de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Manchester University Press, 1986, for a now ‘classic’ summation of this position concerning ‘reading’.
- Here one could suggest that Burn's themes have some affinities with Slavoj Zizek's claims about the nation, or the national, as a ‘remainder’ to a Cartesian universalism in political thought, see his ‘Formal Democracy and Its Discontents’, chapter 9 of Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1991 and ‘Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!’, chapter 6 of Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993. Burn's position might be defined as introducing the contingency of the ‘local’ (the periphery and the peripheral, the cross-cultural, the regional) into the Western discourse of art which has usually tended to favour universal suppositions that can be integrated into a grand schema.
Australian Journal of Art
Volume 12, 1994 - Issue 1: In Memoriam: Ian Burn