THIRD PERSON
Where does all of this work come from? This question immediately drops him into a pool of inherited abilities, parents’ influence, schooling, mentors and artist colleagues, the culture he grows up in—what in simple terms is the nature/nurture dialectic. English is his third language, third to Russian and German. His Russian and German belong to the immediate post WW2 period, therefore are languages of recent animosity, but also long-standing communion. This dissonant fit of cultures is played out in Australia, and leads to a complex of connections to English culture, but with imagined links also to German idealism and art education, to the experimental periods in Russian art. His Australian education teaches him that London is the centre of the world, and only through a visit there does he realise that it is not so for him. His centres are plural, more like Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg. He has no sense of a clash of cultures that the migrant is supposed to experience, nor is there a drive to assimilate, or to ethnic distinction.
He views Australia as an exotic place. But some aspects turn out to be familiar in tone. He is an exile, just as the English convicts, the Naval Forces, and the difficult members of the English gentry were. All faced an exotic country to which their descendants are still not reconciled. In sympathy, he is attracted to the simplified architecture of Georgian Antipodeia, its diagrammatic paintings, its cedar furniture, Indian and Chinese textiles. He notes that that era’s necessary strategy of doing the most with the least is a platonic rule worth following. While the Georgians faced a new country and culture, his exotic host has been the English Settlement, which, he notes with wry amusement, occasionally refers to itself as ‘European’.
By accident, or luck, or fate, he finds employment in a design school which presents him with abandoned paper, cardboard, glues, drawing tools, crayons, paints, liquid paper, shredders and a workshop with tools, and even more leftover materials. All of these provide direct and available answers to questions of appropriate vehicle, medium, size of work and colour. Less than a third of his output uses these given materials, but he still develops a reputation for up-cycling, bricoleuring, for using found objects. The aesthetics of office work comes with this cornucopia and links it (without any intention on his part) to Conceptual Art production by others.
He is unskilled and finds ways around this. Interestingly, he avoids confronting this directly, and refuses to do any instruction or training. To his delight, he belongs to a generation for whom skill and workmanship are guarantees of craft and not art: therefore, the way to denote ‘art’ is to demonstrate ‘not-skill’. Lack of skill creates another working habit: the long gestation time needed to map out strategies which involve the least amount of work, or rather, the least amount of skilled work. His preference for composing material analogues of his subject matter, so that the materials and the making of the work contribute rather than just support only adds to the gestation time. Despite the lack of skills – perhaps better described as conventional ‘artist skills’ – his realised objects and images seem to be clean, neat and precise. This precision, meant to be transparent and neutral, is taken as his aesthetic by some. He is irritated by these interpretations of his work, as if the viewers and readers have missed the point of it all.
Another description that puzzles him is ‘geometric’. This particularly struck him when a colleague referred to ‘those geometric drawings of yours’. (“What geometry?” was his immediate reaction; “I don’t do geometric works”). Always thinking about relationships, he had assumed that the geometry would be seen as arbitrary, neutral, and instrumental. After this encounter, he was indeed startled by the sharp geometry of one his recent exhibitions. This has directed him to a-geometric forms, or rather to forms which emerge from the properties of matter, sometimes near-living matter such as lichen. He is dismissive of ‘organic’ forms, as they quickly draw attention to themselves, and carry too many unwanted associations.
He always works in multiples, or variations or iterations. A single word can mean many things: this is the central meaning of his lifelong project of exploring different configurations of the word ‘monotone’. The same idea can slip from genre to genre. Books and prints easily fit this multiplicity. In making books which are ‘unique copies’, the contradiction of industrial production against specific circumstances comes to the fore: this dialectic is an undercurrent of thinking for him. Multiple also means an output of many small things, as the work is self-funded, and disconnected from commercial distribution systems.
He wonders if the accumulation of work amounts to anything larger than a collection of bits. As they are being done, each bit seems to promise insights into daily life and language. He notices that some works fade away over time, and others renew themselves or rather, reveal aspects not noticed by him when they were being made. While he is preoccupied with current ideas and projects, others seem more interested in works done a decade or two ago. He notes that this is so common an experience for creative workers that Woody Allen has the aliens in one of his films advise him to continue working, saying that “we enjoy your films, particularly the early, funny ones”.
He balances, or controls, his nagging self-doubt with a refusal to engage in art and poetry politics, and in particular prizes and awards and competitions. This is simply scorn for fashionable forms and ideas, based on the faith that an artist’s total output, or a large sample of it, must be judged as a whole on its own terms – and this brings him back to the crisis of what it all amounts to. But it also echoes the multiple nature of his practice and of his upbringing. None of it fits easily with traditional categories or genres. He has noticed, that his best audience is a non-art one, one that is receptive but innocent of cultural propaganda and theory. He wonders whether this is because his works come out of, and belong to language. In a literate culture, this means anyone who has had a few decades of experience with speech, writing, and handling print in all of its forms, and is therefore familiar with language, its rules and manifestations.
Alex Selenitsch
April, 2024