installation view
|
27 FEBRUARY - 23 MARCH 1997: Giulia: What do you feel when you're painting? Goffredo: A shudder.1 SUSAN NORRIE Antonioni's 1959 film, L'avventura provides the entry point to the installation entitled Shudder, shown in its complete version in the 1994 exhibition of Susan Norrie's work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Modern Art, Heide in 1995. The constantly shifting and indeed instability of meaning and the elusiveness of narrative in Antonioni's work are also features of Norrie's. The sense of loss of perspective and identity which the characters in the films frequently experience becomes the impetus for an imaginative journey or an investigation, an open-ended exploration, a true experimentation. This loosened perspective and identity might be seen as the position of the Australian artist in the period of late/ post-modernism. Australia figures on several occasions in Antonioni as well, marking a space of the unknown, a landscape - and seascape - of unexplained tragedy.2 In his fine study of Antonioni, Sam Rhodie refers to the oscillation between figuration and abstraction, the fascination with surface, the instability, tenuousness and fragility of things which characterise the work: "The presence of these qualities is not intended as marking philosophic points, so much as a practice which opens up the possibility of a multiplicity of shapes taking shape, of a variety of surfaces being formed, so that the dissolution of the figure and of a defined subject is in a way the precondition for new and interesting and heretofore nonexistent, unknown things to appear."3 All of this can equally be said of Norrie's work and in choosing to use L'avventura as a backdrop in her installation, Norrie has done so because the film, as well as providing a number of formal reference points presents above all a discourse on painting: and in Rhodie's discussion of Antonioni, it is noticeable that he returns often to the relation between figuration and abstraction, terms which usually belong to the realm of art criticism rather than film studies. Norrie's work, on the other hand, moves away from painting and towards the filmic in this work, particularly in her explicitly photographic palette, referenced specifically in the use of the photographer's retouching kit. In taking her title for Shudder from the Antonioni film, Norrie is commenting ironically on the assumption of some kind of mystical experience in the painterly act. For her, it is rather a straightforward technical process, a matter of a particular form of labour, and it is this which she foregrounds in her most recent work. It is also this, which is marked by the decidedly monochromatic palette, since any expressive connotation of colour is reduced to a minimum by this choice and one is confronted by the worked surface alone. The tonal values of particular paintings suggest photographic surfaces: Shudder I, a large rectangular deep grey painting, like skin-tone in shadow, a pock-marked surface is emblematic of both skin and landscape - a desert, the moon etc; Shudder II, a deeper grey and heavily textured painting foregrounds this process of working the surface, but if a content is to be affixed to the painting, then there is a suggestion of the sea, not a calm sea, but the choppy surface experienced when a wind blows up while sailing. It is also like a still from L'avventura, a scene in which nothing is happening, ostensibly, and yet the frame remains full of activity and movement, intensified by the darkness and depth of water, an effect achieved through oil, water's opposite. The reduction to black and white has an additional connotation other than the filmic or photographic. Norrie's movement into sculptural or architectural space for the figurative content of her works requires a minimisation of expressive content in order to foreground the 'figures' - the objects, the vitrines. This is reminiscent of the sixteenth century preceptists who maintained that painting ought to be subject to the work of the architect; as a result painting was often carried out in black and white "so as not to injure the order of Architecture".4 A radical separation of figure and ground has been a feature of Norrie's work in the last five years, in that the paintings have become much more minimal, consisting in most cases of what used to be the ground of her work in the mid eighties. At the same time, the figurative elements have left the canvas and entered sculptural or architectural space, contained not so much by the painterly frame, (which has been one of the stages in this movement, as seen for example in RSVP) but now increasingly by the framing of the vitrine, the museum display case or, most intensely, the free-standing model, which denies the spectator any of the comforts of distance supplied by the frame or the vitrine. What is set up in this relation is a continuing oscillation between painting and its subject, a flutter, a shudder, which always draws us back to painting itself. As Yve-Alain Bois has put it: "Every time looking at a painting obliges me to reshuffle the cards and redirect the genealogies, I think of Duchamp's distaste for turpentine and how many more things have yet to be explored for this smell to vanish entirely from our lives."5 Helen Grace Senior Lecturer, University of Western Sydney 1 Michaelangelo Antonioni: L'avventura 1959 2 In L'avventura, when the characters arrive on the island,
they discover a hermit who had lived in Australia for thirty years and in
Il Grido, the husband of the main character has died in Australia, providing
the opening for the sexual tension which is the film's focus. Quattro uomini
in mare, a short story written in 1976, and the basis of the unmade film,
The Crew is inspired by the (true) story of a yacht brought into port at
Coff's Harbour with three remaining crew members who tell a barely credible
story of the loss of the captain.
4 Maravall: Sociopolitical Objectives of the Use of Visual Media in The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (University of Minnesota Press, 1986. First published in 1975 in a Spanish edition) p255. 5 Bois Yve-Alain: Life after the 'Death of Painting' in Grace H (ed) Aesthesia & the Economy of the Senses (UWS, 1996) p218. |
|
installation view |