The Idea of Art: Building an International Contemporary Art Collection

ANTHONY BOND OAM is a freelance writer and curator. Until 2013 he was Director, Curatorial at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, where, from 1984, he was responsible for the gallery’s collection of international contemporary art. Among the many major exhibitions he has curated are Francis Bacon: Five decades (2012–13), Body (1997), Self portrait: Renaissance to contemporary (2005–06) and Anselm Kiefer: Aperiatur terra (2006–07). He was also curator of the inaugural Liverpool Biennial in 1999 and the 1992 Biennale of Sydney. His writing on art has been published widely in Australia and internationally.

<www.anthonybond.com.au>

‘Tony Bond has been a passionate supporter and colleague of artists. His collaboration has been both participatory and enabling. It comes from his profound belief in the value of art as an instrument of understanding central to being human. His intimate knowledge of and friendship with artists and empathy with their processes gives his insight a particular richness and relevance.’

– ANTONY GORMLEY, ARTIST

‘Collections are the lifeblood of art museums. Anthony Bond has left a great legacy to both the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Sydney in creating an important collection of international standing. This book allows such vital scholarship to be shared and further expands the gallery’s reputation.’

– MICHAEL BRAND, DIRECTOR, ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

‘Curating has become a hot topic in both publishing and education, yet the important task of creating a public collection has rarely been addressed. This book offers a unique insight into the establishment and development of an international contemporary art collection by a leading Australian practitioner. It is essential reading for all aspiring museum professionals.’

– DR SUSAN BEST, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNSW ART & DESIGN

‘Art museums all have formal policies for shaping their collections but none is like Anthony Bond’s for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he took charge of international art just when Mervyn Horton had bequeathed a then vast endowment for buying ‘non-Australian’ contemporary art. We soon noticed the arrival of extremely impressive works … Now we read Bond’s post–Marcel Duchamp rationale for a collection in which art objects and their embedded ideas speak to the body as much as the mind.’

– DANIEL THOMAS AM, EMERITUS DIRECTOR, ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA, ADELAIDE

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Anthony Bond 2015

First published 2015

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Bond, Anthony, author.

Title: The idea of art: Building a contemporary international

art collection / Anthony Bond.

ISBN: 9781742234359 (paperback)

9781742242033 (ePub/Kindle)

9781742247328 (ePDF)

Notes: Includes index.

Subjects: Art Gallery of New South Wales – History.

Art Gallery of New South Wales – Catalogs.

Art, Modern – 20th century.

Art, Modern – 21st century.

Other Creators/Contributors: Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Dewey Number: 708.99441

Design Di Quick

Cover images Front: Giulio Paolini L’altra figura 1984.

© Giulio Paolini. Back: Alex Rizkalla Remains/vestiges: dispersal 1993. © Alex Rizkalla.

Images All works are from the Art Gallery of New South

Wales collection and © the artist or their estate unless noted otherwise.

Rights and permissions Michelle Andringa, AGNSW

Published in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Contents

Introduction: The contemporary international art collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

——

1    Thinking about ways of being in the world

Duchamp • Gormley • Houshiary • Kapoor • Kiefer • Law • Miyajima • Willats

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2    Transcendence in the here and now

Kiefer • Klein • Lee • Stelarc • Tillers • Unsworth

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3    Found objects used to solicit affect

Andre • Blanchflower • Huws • Kentridge • Long • MacPherson • Miyajima • Roth • Serra • Steinbach • Whiteread

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4    Art that embodies memory

Abramović • Boltanski • Boonma • Clemente • Deacon • Horn • Kounellis • Mais • Muñoz • Neto • Parr • Rrap • Salcedo

——

5    Another look at conceptual art

Burn • Kosuth • LeWitt • Paolini • Perejaume • Richter • Weiner

——

Notes

——

List of illustrated works

——

Acknowledgments

——

Index

Introduction

——

The contemporary international art collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

In 1984, as a newly appointed curator, I was given the task of building a collection of international contemporary art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Given the plurality of art from the 1970s through to the 1980s and the persistent confusion about what we mean by ‘contemporary’, I saw this as an unprecedented opportunity to assemble a coherent body of work that might represent the most powerful art of our time, a collection with a central idea unlike any other public collection of its kind in the world. It would even attempt to define why art still matters and to begin to rethink what art can be. It would not be a collection of everything done in the late twentieth century and beyond, but it would begin to map how a particular kind of art grapples with the fundamental problems of being and doing in human history from a contemporary point of view.

It is rare for a museum to have the opportunity to build a collection from scratch, and yet this is what happened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1984. The Australian publisher Mervyn Horton (1917–83) left a substantial part of his estate to the gallery to support the collection of ‘non-Australian’ contemporary art. The wording was quite specific to make clear his intention to bring the best recent art from beyond Australia to our public.

In the process of putting together the collection over twenty-nine years, certain artists were particularly influential, their ideas and work playing a large part in shaping and refining the collection and my interpretation of it. These artists, with many of whom I became lifelong friends, include the German painter Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945); the British sculptors Antony Gormley (b. 1950), Tony Cragg (b. 1949), Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) and Anish Kapoor (b. 1954); Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo (b. 1958); British conceptual painter and sculptor Bob Law (1934–2004); American conceptualists Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) and Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942); British conceptual artist Stephen Willats (b. 1943); and Australian conceptual artist Ian Burn (1939– 93). I have also been privileged to enjoy many fascinating discussions with the Italian art historian Arturo Schwarz (b. 1924). Schwarz was as close professionally as anyone to the great French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp (1887– 1968) – who became central to my argument – and to Rotraut Klein-Moquay, the widow of French avant-gardist Yves Klein (1928–62), and her husband Daniel Moquay, who manages the Yves Klein Estate. Although the gallery’s collection began as an international one I always included Australians whose art sat well within the conceptual framework of the collection, showing their work side by side with the best in the world, as it should be. Many of these Australian artists are covered in this book. Additionally, my wife Anne Graham, who does not appear in this publication, has been a great inspiration to me, as her practice as both an artist and an academic deals with concepts that are also central to my thinking.

The underlying principles that partly define the gallery’s contemporary collection have been implicit in western art for 500 years, but they became explicit in Europe, and to a significant degree in South America, Japan and the United States in the post-war period. These principles include the invitation by the artist to the viewer to complete the work imaginatively. The sixteenth-century Italian painter Titian, for example, used such lively brushwork in his late work that from close up it appeared to be only texture but from a distance resolved in the mind’s eye to become recognisable forms, thus bringing the viewer into the creative process. I believe this relationship between artist and viewer is the key to understanding the twentieth-century avant-garde and much of current practice, whatever its medium.

This notion of inclusion is central to the first wave of avant-garde art at the start of the twentieth century and was reasserted after the Second World War. Both manifestations rebelled against authority and hierarchical society. There was a shift away from the idea that feeling in art emanated from the artist’s internal world to an understanding of it as a moment of engagement between a viewer and an art object. It also became normal that viewers should be considered active participants in the creation of meaning. In the early twentieth century, for example, the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) broke the boundaries between fine art, architecture and design to make art that directly served society. Dada artists in the same period often took to the streets in protest and, like their post-war followers the Situationists in France, made banners, posters and graffiti. In post-war Europe, pop art, happenings, kinetic and cybernetic art were all discussed in terms of a return to the everyday and the emancipation of the viewer.

These ideas supported art that engaged with the real world and our experience of it. Sometimes this art could take the form of socio-political, philosophical or intrapersonal enquiry. It could also take to the street, as with the public interventions of the Situationists in the 1960s, or take from the street, as pop art did with its use of everyday images from popular culture. Décollage, for example, is a French movement of the 1950s and 1960s that involved the selective stripping away of layers of paper from the accumulation of imagery on billboards. The physiological and optical effects of kinetic art in the same period involved the motion of the viewer’s body (as well as their eyes). It was a time when the history of visual representation was open to scrutiny. This scrutiny included intensely cognitive reflections (as well as more metaphysical speculations) on the nature of thought and representation in conceptual art, but in all the interactive character of representation was part of the equation.

The question of representation is linked to the enduring problem of understanding what we are as humans and how we visualise our being. An underlying preoccupation of philosophy – and for that matter of normal human curiosity – is to understand how consciousness relates to matter. It is the apparent incommensurability of the two realms that makes our existence between them seem precarious. Our mortality highlights the issue, as we will all eventually return to the earth from which our awareness emerged. Art has always been a powerful way of investigating the interface between material or mater (mother) or earth and our consciousness. Artists experience this every time they take some kind of matter – paint, clay, shoes, fat, felt, feathers, bags of spice, railway sleepers or a ball of string – and use it to make something they could never have known prior to materialising it. Mind engaging with matter manifests ideas that the mind alone cannot imagine. Art that explores these ideas became a focus of the gallery’s collecting.

In a lecture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1997, the sculptor Tony Cragg vividly described the artist’s creative engagement with material process. His explanation contextualises the transcendental speculations of artists who became central to the gallery’s international collection, such as Antony Gormley and Anselm Kiefer, in a practical and concrete but nonetheless marvellous way. Cragg talked about the artist having a pencil and paper and how, regardless of whether they use it to draw or to write down ideas, a similar mysterious process occurs. He described them making some marks, erasing, altering or adding to them, and then stepping back to look at what they have done only to discover something unexpected: ‘I did not know that’, was how he put it. The pencil was part of the material process that guided the artist’s mind towards a state between knowing and being in the world – something that