- Studio Album 1983–4. I would like to thank Tim Johnson for permission to examine and quote from two valuable visual diaries in his studio, which I refer to here as Buddhist Studio Album (ca. 1975–95) and Studio Album 1983–4. Johnson patiently answered my questions in interviews on 30 April, 20 May, and 28 May 2012 in Camperdown, Sydney.
- Reproduced in the calendar Transfield 1987: Works from the Sixth Biennale of Sydney (month of February); in Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1990, 3rd ed. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991), 540; in Julie Ewington and Wayne Tunnicliffe, eds., Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery; Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2009), 51, 119.
- On the modern copy, see Jean-Pierre Cuzin, ed. Copier, Créer (Paris: Musée du Louvre and Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993); and Roger Benjamin, ‘Recovering Authors: The Modern Copy, Copy Exhibitions and Matisse’, Art History 12, no. 2 (June 1989): 176–201.
- See Merryn Gates, ed., Tim Johnson: Across Cultures (Parkville, Vic: University of Melbourne Museum of Art, 1993), 4–10; and Roger Benjamin, ‘Inner Landscapes’, in Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas, 28–43.
- See Chris McAuliffe, ‘“Disturbing the Edges of What We Call Art”: Tim Johnson and Punk’, in Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas, 20–7.
- Tim Johnson, interview with the author, 28 May 2012).
- See Donna Leslie, ‘Painting the Divine’, in Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas, 52–3.
- Paintings by Tim Johnson, Erskine Street Gallery, Sydney, 16 July-7 August 1976).
- See Merryn Gates, Tim Johnson: Across Cultures, 4–10, and Roger Benjamin, ‘Inner Landscapes’, 28–43.
- Johnson recalls consulting a small book by Langdon Warner, the American sinologist. Fisher Library has two of his books: Langdon Warner, The Long Old Road in China, with Illustrations from Photographs (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926), and Buddhist Wall-Paintings: A Study of a Ninth-Century Grotto at Wan Fo Hsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Radcliffe Fine Arts Series, 1938).
- An excellent summary is Roderick and Alison Whitfield, Cave Temples of Mogao: Art and History on the Silk Road (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000); see also the in-depth studies of Sarah E. Fraser, Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia 618–960 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), and Eugene Y. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005).
- Langdon Warner, The Long Old Road in China, 138.
- See Sarah Fraser, Performing the Visual, passim.
- M. Aurel Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay: Personal Narrative of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China (London: Macmillan, 1912). See also Kinga Devenyi and Agnes Kelecsenyi, Hidden Treasure of the Silk Road: Aurel Stein and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 22 November-15 December 2007, http://dunhuang.mtak.hu/index-en.html.
- Sarah Fraser, Performing the Visual, 4–5.
- Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
- Aurel Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay, passim; see also his major book, Serindia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921).
- Paul Pelliot, Les Grottes de Touen-Houang, 6 vols. (Paris: Librairie Paul Guenther, 1914–24); for an online facsimile, see National Institute of Informatics (Japan), Digital Silk Road Project, Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books, http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/toyobunko.
- See Basil Gray, Buddhist Cave Paintings at Tun-Huang (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959), with 24 colour plates; Terukazo Akiyama and Saburo Matsubara, Arts of China Vol. 2: Buddhist Cave Temples: New Researches (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969); and The Art Treasures of Dun Huang, compiled by Dun Huang Institute of Cultural Relics (Hong Kong and New York: Lee Publishers, 1981). Recent colour publication has been crowned by multi-volume compendia in Chinese. These include Dunhuang shiku yishu (Art of the Dunhuang Caves), ed. Duan Wenjie, 22 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsi meishu chubanshe, 1996); and Dunhaung shiku quanji (Complete Works of Dunhuang), ed. Duan Wenjie et al., 28 vols. to date (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Commercial Press, 1999-). Today, there are also online resources, thanks to Dunhuang's UNESCO World Heritage listing and a preservation project led by Getty Conservation Center and Dunhaung Academy.
- He had already begun the same process for Papunya art, assembling two large volumes of magazine illustrations, postcards, and, above all, his own colour photographs of Aboriginal paintings.
- See The Drunken Boat: Paintings by Tim Johnson, 21 February-10 March 1984 (Leichhardt: Mori Galley, 1984), in Tim Johnson artist's file, Library of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Arts of China was a source for five of his key subject-images, in its plates 7, 44, 45, 50, and 57, and several explanatory texts. The rest came from Wan Gengyu and Huang Wenkun, ‘Notes to the Plates’, in The Art Treasures of Dun Huang, 219–37.
- See Imants Tillers, ‘Locality Fails’, Art and Text, no. 6 (1982): 51–60.
- Tim Johnson, interview with the author, 20 May 2012).
- Tim Johnson, interview with the author, 30 April 2012).
- Tim Johnson, interview with the author, 28 May 2012).
- Tim Johnson, Studio Album 1983–4, 14. The reference to Margaret Preston shows his early awareness of this Sydney modernist's mid-century attempts to develop an art inspired by Aboriginal aesthetics.
- See Merryn Gates, Tim Johnson: Across Cultures, 7, 9.
- Terry Smith in Australian Painting, 540.
- In 1924, Langdon Warner described the damage to many caves after a regiment of some five hundred White Russian soldiers were interned at Mogao after the Bolshevik (Long Old Road to Cathay, 140). The other great problem is flaking surfaces due to rising salts and the new exposure to air since caves have been reopened.
- See Dunhuang Academy website, Mogao Cave 217 (High Tang 705–81 AD), http://enweb.dha.ac.cn/0026/index.htm.
- ‘Parable of the Illusory City: Cave 103’, Wan Gengyu and Huang Wenkun, The Art Treasures of Dunhuang, 230; text excerpted in Johnson, The Drunken Boat, n.p.
- See Mark Norell et al., Travelling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World (New York: American Museum of National History; Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2011).
- Eugene Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, 116.
- In Shaping the Lotus Sutra, Eugene Wang devotes an entire chapter to this wall; see 79–121. On the Yin family and the ritual use of the chapel, see 176–81.
- Ibid., 120.
- The main discussion is Neville Drury and Anna Voight, ‘Tim Johnson’, in Fire and Shadow: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Art (Roseville East: Craftsman House, 1996), 103–18.
- Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘Tim Johnson Interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg’, Art and Australia 29, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 44–51, reprinted in Tim Johnson, Painting Ideas, 47.
- Ibid.
- At the time, all these Papunya works were in Johnson's art collection, making access easy, and adding another layer—that of ownership—to his claiming of this hypothetical pictorial space.
- See Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas, 108–12.
- Interview with the author, 20 May 2012).
- On the ethics of Johnson's appropriations of Aboriginal art, see Sue Cramer, ed., Postmodernism: A Consideration of the Appropriation of Aboriginal
- Imagery: Forum Papers (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1989); and Rex Butler, ed., What Is Appropriation?: An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s and 1990s, 2nd ed. (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2004).
- Begun after Illusory City (Studio Album 1983–4, 18), Maitreya Paradise was completed quite quickly, whereas Johnson reworked Illusory City in 1985).
- Meher McArthur, Reading Buddhist Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 173.
- Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas, 46–7.
- Tim Johnson, Studio Album 1983–4, 11. If, as the artist recalls, the Studio Album 1983–4 was filled progressively with photos of his works in the order of their production, this would be the earliest picture of Dunhuang inspiration.
- See Terukazo Akiyama on the High T'ang phase of the early eighth century: ‘the art of the Tun-Huang cave reaches the saturation point in weightiness and corporeality. The golden age in this respect is represented with particularly splendid wall paintings of no. 217’, Arts of China, 14.
- Terukazo Akiyama and Saburo Matsubara, Arts of China, 13.
- The Good Deeds of the Buddha (cave 257), ca. 450, republished in The Drunken Boat; text photocopied from Art Treasures of Dun Huang, 225, in Studio Album 1983–4, 29.
- In The Drunken Boat, Johnson publishes the description from Art Treasures of Dun Huang, catalogue number 40, 224.
- This as yet unpublished Johnson work is photographed in Studio Album 1983–4, 54; the artist has confirmed its source in Cave 254, as illustrated in Art Treasures of Dun Huang, plate 14.
- See Art Treasures of Dun Huang, plate 46, ‘Parable from the Lotus Sutra’, Cave 419.
- Tim Johnson, Studio Album 1983–4, 23.
- Eugene Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, 240, fig. 5.2.
- Johnson's 1986 Illusory City (collection Allen Allen and Helmsley Lawyers, Sydney), with its green tints and delicate scale of purples, shows familiarity with colour reproductions. In 2002, Johnson made a dotted picture based on the central Parable of the Prodigal Son scene from Cave 217, and, as late as 2012, he exhibited an oversized reinterpretation of his Canberra Illusory City at Dominic Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
- For more detail on Johnson's spatial schemata, see Roger Benjamin, ‘Imaginary Landscapes’, 31–2.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 12, 2012 - Issue 1