DON'T LOOK BACK: Curated by Vivienne Roberts

Lewis Baxter, Archie Franks, Oliver Dorrell, Phil Goss, Charlotte Winifred Guérard, Andrew Hewish, Diane Howse, Xingxin Hu, Phil King, Sharon Leahy-Clark, Alice Macdonald, Rosemarie McGoldrick, Rebecca Meanley, Rachel Mercer, Laurence Noga, Miroslav Pomichal, Fiona G. Roberts, Bob and Roberta Smith, Ruth Helen Smith, Ondrej Rypáček, Anna van Oosterom, Eugenie Vronskaya, Laura White, Henry Ward, Mark Wright

I have found that literature and fine art evoke similar emotions. The artist not only observes but sees obliquely, as out of the corner of their eye, things distorted by emotion, and somehow makes them coherent. Willem de Kooning said, ’I’m like a slipping glimpser’. The glimpser seizes the moment and, when successful, engages the viewer. It’s not so much about beauty as the artist’s perception of complex sensations, a form of qui-vive that includes emotion. The gifted artist has the responsibility to awaken experiences of consciousness in others, which is a strange power. This was pointed out by philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze who said that one should fully express one’s potential, go beyond one’s impossibilities, which is to create new possibilities.

Though art has been made from time immemorial, (the human brain contains the history of mankind with its imagery from the grotesque to the beatific), the artist, nevertheless, cannot imitate the past without being derivative. The artist has to work through their influences until the noise of others in their head comes to an end and they find their own voice. That said, a great artist can steal, as Picasso said and did, and fashion something totally new, modern, in a seemingly magical transformation.

The artist (at their best) is liberated from indoctrination, because the artist must be free to see what is. Franz Kafka's novel The Trial, begun in 1914, described the mindless machine of bureaucracy and the corridors of power over the hapless individual who didn't know what was going on or what he had done. Meanwhile, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were leaning towards abstraction influenced by musical tones, and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were experimenting with analytical and synthetic cubism, the fragmentation of images, mirroring the collapse of an era; while Claude Monet was painting water lilies with lyrical expressiveness already ahead of his time. Reaction was happening all over Europe leading up to WWI. James Joyce wrote Ulysses in 1918 bringing an epic into a stream of consciousness monologue in a day in the life of his protagonists. After the war, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Christian Schad were painting the decadent life in Berlin leading up to WWII. Historical content can never be dismissed because the artist is reacting to it, which is why authoritarian governments have always banned modern art. The Degenerate Art exhibition (German: Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst”) was organised by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. It drew one million visitors. In the aftermath followed the backlash, breaking into anarchy with Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism; and post-war consumerism with Warhol and pop-art, and Francis Bacon in reaction to “man's capacity for savage violence”.

The title of this exhibition doesn’t mean that history is irrelevant, on the contrary, but that creativity is always new. The angel Philip Guston refers to may come to the studio and that’s when the magic happens. Real painting takes place beyond thought but it’s highly personal, emotional, and more relevant than ever. It’s not the grandiose commissions but the work at human scale that communicates at a deeper level. Now, after decades of dematerialisation of art (inspired by the ramifications of conceptual art invented by Marcel Duchamp), we are at a moment of return when paintings, sculptures, and other ‘made’ objects again speak with urgency and are filled with radical potential. In a time of political, social and moral upheaval, artists are again in rebellion. Ahead of their time, they always react against the previous generation. They can see where we’re going and they’re reacting against it because they feel there is something deeply wrong that is destroying our relationship with reality. There is a struggle for ideas, everything is at stake therefore subject matter is important again. Material art is actually a form of rebellion in this digital age.

Art is what resists: it resists death, servitude, infamy, shame. - Gilles Deleuze

The artist reflects their own experience. It goes beyond illustration or journalism; it is not a reporting of news items but a pouring out of bewilderment at the behaviour of one’s own species, without judgement. The moment judgement comes into the equation it's reduced to propaganda. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ is a prime example of the artist’s testimony free of constraint, uncensored. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Christopher Wool, Bruce Nauman, and in this show, Bob and Roberta Smith, use words in their artworks that are thought provoking - echoing voices in the wilderness that might be heard when made into an art form.

The artist is the poet and the mystic. At times funny, childlike, ironic, excessive, burlesque, disturbing, depressed, dark - reflecting myriad facets of the mind. Literature, music and the plastic arts that is to say the ‘poets’ have left behind powerful testimonies to how they dealt emotionally, psychologically and philosophically with the times they lived through. The artists in this exhibition are individualistic, making physical art even in this new age of technology where we are assailed with incessant advertising and a confusion of digital images on the internet. The artist knows that the intelligent, thinking, sentient human being will never be a machine that can be programmed. These artists express their lyricism with colour and drawing, paint and mark making, as in a love letter that lays bare the writer's soul to be vulnerable, for without vulnerability there is no sensitivity. Their art is an ongoing pledge to care - to care about what we are at the core of our being, despite the unsettling challenges of cyberspace pervading our world.

~ Vivienne Roberts