Following an appearance at the third Sydney Biennale in 1979, Abramovic and her artistic collaborator and lover Ulay – German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen – trekked out to  central Australia and requested to meet the indigenous people of Western Australia’s Little Sandy Desert, near Lake Disappointment [according to Douglas' interview]. That meeting [he relates] would become the best part of a year living with the local Aborigines.  “For me, Aborigines are the most natural human beings: they live not in the past or in the future but in the present. They have a story and a meaning  for everything, “ she says. “In that desert I spent a lot of time just sitting down: meditating, listening to the silence. This is what opened my universe.”

According to Douglas’ interview, it was in the desert that Abramovic had her epiphany:

…what she terms a “non-rational extra sense of perception”. “I walked out of that desert after a year and had this realization that, ‘Wow. I see things differently. I am new.’”

The historical account tells it somewhat differently, as history is wont to do. In The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Sydney, 2001), in a chapter devoted to these artists, author Charles Green concludes his description of Ambramovic and Ulay’s experience as a form of contemporary “primitivism.” What follows is how he comes to this conclusion:

BE STILL QUIET AND SOLITARY: Abramovic and Ulay in the Desert

Artists forestalled the consciousness that they were aware of being beheld by removing themselves from the audience – literally absenting themselves to distant, isolated places where the only evidence of their actions after the event would be photographic or documentary traces of solitude and self-absorbtion in a desert, wilderness, or darkness. Marina Abramovic and Ulay incorporated an extreme type of this artistic “tourism’ into their work. Their search for an expanded sense of self, one that they were sure was possessed by the Aboriginal people living in the Central Australian desert, might be seen as touristic – as yet another chapter in modern art’s narrative of cultural primitivism. But if their romanticism was necessarily an orientalism, then such charges should probably be leveled at anyone who ever leaves home or empathizes with somebody else. In any case, as Ambramovic later observed. “Australia changed my life dramatically.”

Marina Abramovic and Ulay were already shifting the focus of their work from violent actions to passive immobility (even though both types of work  involved audience obliviousness) during 1979, when they had performed [in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney]… They returned to Australia in 1980, traveling between October 1980 and March 1981 across Central Australia. Their slightly mad, Bruce Chatwin-like epic of crushing heat (they were visiting the center during its searing-hot summer), loneliness, disappointment, and delayed epiphany took them, like the English traveler and novelist, to Papunya 9near Alice Springs), where, coincidentally, major Aboriginal artists had been producing acrylic paintings on canvas since 1971 – and then through the Gibson Desert to Leonora, Wiluna, and Mount Newman. Abramovic and Ulay spent considerable time alone in the desert. Much of their journey was spent struggling with sheer physical discomfort while camping alone for extended periods at remote desert water holes, but they were at the same time refining and extending their experiences of immobility and self-absorbtion. According to Abramovic: “But, also, it is quite logical that we went to the desert because of our kind of background, and the work we do. We minimalize… and we try to realize with pure body and energy.” They were using the opportunity presented by their solitary existence to develop a heightened sensitivity and, they hoped, the ability to communicate through means other than speech or physical sight – in other words, through telepathy and clairvoyance…

In the brief interview published shortly after they had returned from the desert, Abramovic and Ulay recorded their frustration with the apparently inaccessible primitive Other. Abramovic said, “I must say for myself I expect very much from the contact with the Aborigines, and I get very disappointed,” adding, “I found there was something like a wall between them and me.” [in Jennifer Phipps, “Marina Abramovic/Ulay/Ulay/Marina Abramovic,” Art & Text, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 43-50] Nevertheless Abramovic and Ulay were eager to draw parallels between the nomadic heritage of desert Aborigines and their artistic practice. She observed: “We move all the time; they move all the time.” She noted the impermanence of both her performance actions and Aboriginal ceremonies…

Abramovic and Ulay expected Aboriginal artists to create paintings as close as possible to traditional culture, but Aboriginal artists desired to hide those truths. Contrary to the European artists’ desires, Aboriginal artists enacted the same refusal to enact or instruct contemporary artists such as Abramovic and Ulay.  The European artists, however, were oblivious to the cultural ironies attendant upon what was a largely vicarious, albeit completely sincere, romanticism. Abramovic recalled that the Aborigines they met were completely indifferent to them: “The Aborigines were not impressed at all.” Abramovic and Ulay’s literally fantastic expectations of what they would find in their meetings with Aboriginal tribal elders in the desert were – at least initially – ludicrous and predictably disappointing…

Green continues: Ambramovic and Ulay’s melodramatic expectations were the result of their powerful desires for the supernatural, which they projected onto Aboriginal actors in their spiritual “desert quest”; the result was primitivism.

In a later essay Green analyses a subsequent, and apparently more successful encounter, that is here only mentioned in passing: “Later, however, they forged powerful and rewarding relationships with Central Desert Aborigines, which culminated in Aboriginal participation in one Amsterdam version of Nightsea Crossing. (1983)”. In this more detailed account (“Group Soul: Who Owns the Artists Fusion?” in Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 595-608) Green relates the circumstances of Abramovic and Ulay’s second visit to Papunya, in 1981, where they witnessed significant paintings being made, and where they met the famous artist, Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi. It was the latter artist they flew to Amsterdam to participate in the work Conjunction (1983). In Conjunction, Abramovic and Ulay and their two invitees sat facing each other across a round gold-leafed table for seven hour periods. At the other points of the compass, Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi sat facing the Tibetan Lama Ngawang Soepa Lueyar.  Of this work, Green suggests, inter alia: “Abramovic and Ulay, it might be argued, were indulging in a problematic exploitation – an orientalisation – of Aboriginality and Tibetan culture through stereotyping. The chromatic coding [of their costumes] could be understood to fix their collaborators in aspic, according to which ‘Aboriginal’ art or ‘Tibet’ would indicate the condition of a ‘spiritual’ thing, thus undermining from within the primary sense of the collective inaccessibility from which these works emerge.”

It would seem to this reader, on the basis of Abramovic’s most recent comments at the head of this post that this thread of romantic primitivism remains the take-home theme of this artist’s Australian experience.

Nearly two decades ago Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational art’ to describe “a set of practices which takes as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” (Bourriaud 2002: 113) Relational artists are, he said, orientated towards collective rather than individualistic expression, and envisage their art as a political rather than aesthetic project. Nowadays everyone is a relational artist, or so it seems.

With the latest acquisition by the National Gallery of Australia of the work ‘A–Z homestead unit’ by the Californian relational artist Andrea Zittel, it is the presence for ten days of the Canberra/Melbourne artist Charlie Sofo that will provide the work with its social context, as he “customizes” the work, (according to the Gallery blurb) and blogs his experiences. Sofo has been invited to inhabit this diminutive “dwelling” – on his own terms – using it either as a space for work, for thought, or to sleep over.

In itself, habitable art has been around for a lot longer that relational art. In the mid-seventies, the Californian/Australian artist Marr Grounds, together with his two dogs Mutt and Pete, “inhabited” a sandbag bunker (entitled the “art thing”) that he had built under the stairs in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

People visited, and contributed to his evolving concept of a participatory art practice: visitors to the “art thing” poured sand onto prepared “art bit” cards, and took them away as their own work. Grounds’ motive was as much a commentary on the elitist climate of the art world as it was an experiment in a “democratic” mode of practice.

Like the later work by Tim Burns and Michael Callaghan in the same museum, living in the gallery space was a deliberately disruptive gesture aimed at challenging the prevailing modernist dogma of art’s autonomy from its social context, intending instead to  re-conceptualise the gallery as a social space.

If these were some of the precursors of relational art in Australia, Zittel’s work occupies another world indeed. Like a piece of DIY backyard furniture, if it were more functional, and a lot less expensive, it’s the kind of thing you might buy at Bunnings, the local hardware store. More like a commodity than a piece of sculpture, it gestures towards lived spaces, without having to function in anything but a nominal manner as a space in which anyone might actually live.

Made of steel, glass and chipboard-based building materials, it’s about the size of two double beds, and contains the kind of basic equipment you’d need for a camping holiday. However its functionality leaves a lot to be desired. There are no windows to open, no screens, and the mosquitoes are free to come and go through the gaps around the roof. The glass walls are enhanced by printed imagery which depicts a kind of abstracted reflection of a surrounding landscape. Other than the print imagery, there is nothing to suggest that this is a sculptural object, or a work of art in any recognizable sense. It is so loaded with other kinds of referents (to homelessness, to isolation, to incarceration, even) that it functions both as a kind of inversion of an aesthetic discourse as much as it suggests its impossibility as a space to live in.

While this work has been located on the lawns of the NGA sculpture garden, for it to have any kind of longevity it will ultimately have to be moved to a sheltered environment, or the galleries indoors. In that context its aesthetics will be rendered even more bizarre. One wonders in what context this could be shown… as some banal parody of Utopian Design, perhaps?

Perhaps it is only its rumoured price tag of $150,000 that will signify its institutional significance as a work of art. Clearly relational art is no longer a zero-sum game.

Author’s disclosure: Pete the dog also belonged to your iconophile.

In late 1989 the last troops of the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan had left after a decade of resistance by the various forces of the mujihadeen. During this period of time one finds an extraordinary profusion of visual media opposing the Soviet occupation. Contradictions abound in the visual record of this unhappy decade. The non-traditional narrative carpets of this period constitute a form of indigenous modernism which occurs independent of other modes of contemporary visual art occurring elsewhere in the world. However the rug shown here is an exception to the rule. One of only two known examples, each of which differs slightly from the other, this remarkable image is clearly derived from the Socialist Realist style of the post-WW2 era, in a complex pictorial montage which depicts the heroic resistance of the mujahideen against the military might of Soviet heavy armour.

What makes the this carpet so unusual, and surprising, is the way it breaks with (almost) all the conventions of carpet tradition. It is proof (if we needed convincing) that carpet weavers could indeed “make anything.” Its design is familiar to a Western modernist eye insofar as it deliberately combines a number of models of representation in a mode of simultaneity – not unlike its 20^th century precursors of cubist collage and photomontage. The production of an explicitly “Western” representation in celebration of the defeat of the Soviets makes another kind of claim for modernity – or rather, for a modernity that is not dependent on the exercise of Soviet military power.

In this image the two Soviet tanks rendered in perspectival precision are represented on fire in the foreground of the Darul Aman Palace – itself subsequently destroyed during the civil war of the mid 90s. The spatial devices of these forms lead the eye to the left of the image, where a clean shaven Afghan youth wearing a pakol and bearing a flag bearing the inscription Allahu Akbar! stands in front of the Paghman Victory Arch, which was built in 1919 to celebrate the defeat of that other Imperial Power, Great Britain. In the frame below the boy a horseman also carries a flag on which is inscribed Allah. The rest of the frame contains supplementary images which function like the predella on a pre-Rennaisance Italian altarpiece. These are composed of five or six naturalistic vignettes showing scenes of warfare, repeated left and right, in different combinations.

Between 1978 and 2004 Afghanistan changed its flag eleven times. Only in 1992 did the Republic of Afghanistan have a flag with these words inscribed on it. The source of one of these rugs suggested that they were made by prisoners, and that they were commissioned (ordered) to celebrate the defeat of the Soviets. The last “puppet” dictator, Mohammad Najibullah, who had been installed by the Soviet regime in 1986, was finally ousted in April 1992.

If the carpet was in fact designed to celebrate the victory over the Soviets, at the moment just prior to the civil war (the Palace and the Victory Arch are shown as being still intact), it does so by representing a kind of David and Goliath account of the decade of warfare that has taken place. The Soviet tanks are no match for  Afghan warrior tradition, represented by the men on horseback, and the barehanded mujihadeen who have set the tanks on fire. And this is not yet a visual culture subject to the dictates of the Taliban – under whose rule no man would be permitted to show an unshaven face, even if such a representation of a human being was permissible in the first place.  Such a confusion of signifiers is almost postmodern in character. In its distinctive and atypical style (by comparison to all the other modes of war rugs and carpets produced in this period) it is as if this one sets out to challenge the viewer by asking us to reconcile so many overlapping visual and thematic contradictions occurring within a medium not normally associated with naturalistic representation. Nevertheless, it represents a particular point in the design of war carpets that signals the extremity of the artists’ capacity to cross over between such discrepant visual and cultural traditions.

Hopefully, yes. In the text below you’ll find me proposing that the work of the late Alighiero Boetti should be recognised as a contemporary form of Orientalist practice, despite all the protestations to the contrary. And further, that the surge of biographical and curatorial activity of the last few years – culminating in Boetti’s recent retrospectives at the Museo Reina Sophia, the Tate Modern, and the MoMA, another at the Fowler, and soon another at MAXXI – has produced its own form of a contemporary Orientalist discourse. This has been achieved in the Boetti literature through strategies of denial and negation which have amplified and exaggerated the artist’s original avant-gardist postures. This is posited through a strategy of inversion: the artist’s own denial of agency is set against the retrospective claims now made for his refugee camp workers’ “co-creative” “relational” “collaboration” in the production of his embroidered works. So suggests Mark Godfrey, his most recent biographer, and the Tate Modern curator of his retrospective. To the contrary, I argue that his workers’ anonymous, abstracted, and mystified representations, both in the work and in the literature, is but the latest manifestation of a contemporary orientalism.

Sceptical? Listen to this: “Ali Ghiero, the Bedouin in transit, camped next to the Pantheon” – exemplifies how the latest blurb from MAXXI has (even further) mythologised/orientalised his practice. See here.

ALIGHIERO BOETTI ORIENTALIST

In recent years biographers, curators, and followers of the late Italian Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti have gone out of their way to deny the orientalist character of his work – in favour, even, of presenting him as a prophet of globalism. And yet although Tate Modern’s Mark Godfrey at one point recognises the inherent idealisation in Boetti’s engagement throughout the 1970s with his Afghan “Others”, he also remains convinced that, for Boetti, “Afghanistan should be understood neither as some “other” place untouched by Western civilisation nor as a culture somehow under-developed or ahistorical.”[1]  How can such contradictory views be reconciled? Despite all the evidence to the contrary, including Boetti’s opposition to the modernisation of Afghanistan and his problematic “relationship” with his outsourced workers in the refugee camps of Pakistan, in his recent biography Godfrey asserts his mode of production was evidence of Boetti’s  “determination… [not to] represent them… the peoples he met… as an exotic other.” Such are the twists and turns of the logic of denial and inversion in the Boetti story.

Art History 101 teaches us that Orientalist Art is characterised by analysis of the representation of “exotic” Others and the conditions of their presentation and reception in the Euro-American West. The consequences for an understanding of the historical context of the colonialist relations between ‘the West’ and its ‘Eastern’ subjects places such art in its wider socio-political context. So it goes, in university classrooms around the world.

The reputation of Alighiero Boetti has received much attention through the recent suite of retrospective exhibitions at the Museo Reina Sofia, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Modern Art, plus the recent more comprehensive exhibition at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. These shows have triggered substantial catalogues, monographs and other publications, plus numerous reviews and other commentary. All of these have, to greater or lesser degree, repeated and elaborated a set of myths in relation to the outsourced embroideries, kilims, and carpets Boetti commissioned in Afghanistan and Pakistan between the years 1972 and 1994. How this work has been characterised, especially in the period following his death in 1994, raises the question of whether an orientalist critique might remain pertinent despite the dominance of The Contemporary in the Era of Globalisation.

Any review of a contemporary orientalism would need to examine whether questions of representation, exoticism, and alterity still hold relevance for the present moment. Questions like these may be further exemplified in relation to strategies of presentation, looking at how such work is contextualised, and what claims are made for the work and its author’s intentions. If one thinks of Alighiero Boetti as an historical figure, rather than as a hero of the contemporary, then it’s arguable that he fulfils all the criteria listed above.

To recognise how Boetti represents his Others in his work requires some retrospectivity: the kinds of avant-garde strategies that were prevalent during the period of his formulation of key works in the early 70s became the model for all of the work he produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death in 1994. The readymade, montage, chance, “systems aesthetics”, outsourcing, and denial of agency were all creative strategies that held sway in the period when Boetti first formulated the means of production which depended on the skills of women embroiderers, in Afghanistan in the 70s, and in the refugee camps of Pakistan in the 80s and 90s. Boetti’s workers – the women he never met – became the invisible subjects common to all the embroideries that he titled Mappa, Arazzo, and Tutto. They are represented in these works by the visible evidence of their embedded labour. It is impossible to stand in front of one of these works (let alone a whole exhibition of them) without being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of his subjects’ painstakingly detailed self-identification.

If for no other reason than this, these works are amazing objects. The awe-inspiring scale and the repetitive form of their makers’ labour knows no equal in the contemporary West. They are both digital and hand-made, taken to an infinite degree. To the Euro-American viewer, they connote a means of production – a world – so profoundly unlike anything one experiences in the contemporary moment that one is overwhelmed by the sense of their exotic otherness. Indeed this is how Boetti saw Afghanistan: “I, who had been in a house in Turin only a few hours earlier, now see a caravan pass me by, in the year 1000. And it is I who am given this vision…” In addition, that he saw Afghanistan as a kind of cultural terra nullius reveals the basis on which he progressed his plans to make use of the opportunities it presented to him. In 1972 he had his workers inscribe the following text in the margins of one of the earliest Mappa: “… in Kabul with Dastaghir [Boetti’s agent] we made something from nothing… to bring the world into the world…” This sense of exotic alterity that pervades his early work in Afghanistan persisted until the last years of his life. In an interview with Nicolas Bourriaud in 1992 he relates: “what fascinates me most is the bareness, the civilisation of the desert… In an Afghan house, for example, there is nothing.” Except, as he noticed, their indigenous textiles…

Particularly in the publications of the past few years (by Cerizza, Godfrey, Bennett et al) the question of the authenticity of Boetti’s embroideries has been put to the test in relation to other traditional and contemporary modes of textile production by Afghan artisans unconnected to the Boetti enterprise. Boetti himself effectively mythologised the role of his production as a reinvention of tradition: “Embroidery came to a stop in their country in the 1920s, but started anew with my contracts.” Fortunately, the curators at the Fowler Museum have been able to demonstrate the falsity of this claim by exhibiting the Boettis side-by-side with contemporaneous forms of embroidery from different regions of Afghanistan. Equally, but problematically, there has been a fashion for exhibiting Afghan war rugs alongside Boetti tapestries, or otherwise asserting that the Boetti enterprise somehow triggered a wave of innovation in other textile forms. This is a myth which cannot be substantiated, and that has been exaggerated out of all proportion in the Boetti literature. As I have argued elsewhere, the implicit or explicit associations between the two media as suggested by their association in exhibitions and publications serves to suggest that it is the authenticity of Boetti’s new style of embroidery that this strategy seeks to demonstrate. This is, however, yet one more example of the assumption that modernity can only be generated in the West. This perspective, as Edward Said has suggested, can only be comprehended “from an uncritically essentialist standpoint… which observes the Orient from afar, and so to speak, from above.” Such curatorial and editorial strategies of contextualisation have paid little attention to the historical precedents that exist in the various neo-traditional and iconographically innovative forms of textile art that have emerged in Afghanistan over the same quarter century. To attribute all such forms of innovation to the supposed influence of a singular avant-garde entrepreneur requires a remarkably conceited cultural perspective.

With the exception of a limited number of aphoristic interviews, so little exists of Boetti’s own expressed intentions that the field is wide open to posthumous assumptions and historiographically creative interpretations ands projections. It is not so surprising that strategies of denial and inversion pervade all of Boetti’s formative processes in the sixties and early 70s. Thus his often-quoted assertion from 1974 “I did absolutely nothing” is taken uncritically as a kind of mantra – which in Godfrey’s account, becomes a “… principle of making things without invention.” Of course such radical denials of agency were not uncommon in the post-minimalist era of the 1960s and 70s. And yet to Christopher Bennett, such avant-gardist gestures are now being interpreted retrospectively as a kind of automatism – the consequence of an unconsciously assimilated motivation – as if the whole Boetti enterprise was a kind of spontaneous expression of innovation somehow latent in his Peshawar refugee camp workforce.

Of all the claims and projections that have been made concerning Boetti’s practice, it is the suggestion that he was the precursor of the relational turn in contemporary art, and that his works had “political” intent or effects, that are the most egregious. If it was presumptive enough for Godfrey to propose Boetti’s method as “collaborative” – remember Boetti always dealt through middlemen – so it is mildly fatuous for him to propose that Boetti had established a “Poetics of Relation”, resulting in a kind of “co-authorship”, and attributing to his workers the status of “co-creators”. Further, he even suggests that when Nicolas Bourriaud was formulating his theory of relational art, he “sought out” Boetti,  “knowing that Boetti’s initiative to open a hotel and to work with diverse producers was an important precedent for the artists… he later grouped together using the term ‘Relational Aesthetics’.” Not only does Bourriaud not elicit any such ideas in his 1992 interview with Boetti, nor does he include Boetti in his exhibition that first defined the concept four years later (“Traffic” 1996). To the contrary, the only mention Bourriaud makes to Boetti in his 1996 book Relational Aesthetics aptly situates him as a kind of neo-colonialist entrepreneur: “When Alighiero Boetti gets 500 weavers in Peshawar, Pakistan, working for him, he represents the work process of multinational companies much more effectively than if he merely portrayed them and described how they work.” (2002:68)

Finally, there is the suggestion that Boetti produced a form of “political” art, despite his earlier denials of political motivation. In his 1992 interview with Bourriaud in his commentary on the supposedly fatalistic character of the Afghan people (“They are totally indifferent to death”) Boetti gives no sense that the politics of post-Soviet Afghanistan translated across to his art. And yet, in an Artforum essay in 2009, Godfrey construed a political motive: “Boetti’s works constituted platforms from which other voices could speak.” The “political voice” theory is based on a dozen or so of the Arazzo embroideries from the late 1980s which contain variations on a statement inscribed in Farsi/Dari which condemns the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.  Nobody knows whose voice this is. Most likely it was one of his agents in Peshawar. Boetti himself never drew attention to these messages, and nobody bothered to publish their translation from the Farsi until 2002. And finally, based on an unsubstantiated anecdote related by one of his gallerists, in his 2011 biography Godfrey elaborated the idea that Boetti travelled “into the mountains” to visit Ahmed Shah Masood, and that he contributed funds to the Northern Alliance. An unlikely invention indeed.

Neither the claims to politics nor the retro-projection towards relational art evidenced above is sufficient to refute the identification of Boetti’s art as a paradigm of late orientalism. Despite its avant-gardist games and strategies of denial, his mode of production conveys all of the characteristic representations of an exotic Other one associates with precursor manifestations of orientalist art. Despite all of the posthumous arguments to the contrary, perhaps it is now time to properly recognise Alighiero Boetti as the last Orientalist artist of the twentieth century, with all the baggage that goes with such an attribution.

and into Neon Parc. Last week I visited Trevelyan Clay’s studio at Gertrude Street to see his new work, which looked very persuasive. The exhibition at Neon Parc is titled “Altar”, opens on Thursday 29th November, and runs until December 21st. A must-see for Melbhattanites, as they’re now called…

Neon Parc is at 1/53 Bourke St, Melbourne.

And Quentin Sprague contributes more here at Stamm.

Artist unknown, Hazara people, prayer stone cover (mohr posh), 1965 -1975, embroidery (silk or mercerised cotton on cotton) 28 x 28cm, Max Allen collection, Canada. (photograph Max Allen)

Emaj is the only Australian online refereed art history journal. Its latest issue includes contributions by Helen Hughes, Keith Broadfoot, Roberta Crisci-Richardson, Darren Jorgensen, Danni Zuvela, Chris Adams plus your iconophile. Its editorial panel is Nicholas Croggon, Jane Eckett, Justine Grace, Katrina Grant, Helen Hughes, Tim Ould, and Francis Plagne.

My essay “A tournament of shadows: Alighiero Boetti, the myth of influence, and a contemporary orientalism” may be accessed here.

Answer: through a guard, sideways. This prescient photograph is from Meredith Rosenberg’s analysis of the effects of the recent Basel art fair, here discussed at Hyperallergic.

The most remarkable aspect of Rodtschenko’s work is the multitude of artistic media and forms. [In] 1912-13 he created works with exotic dancers and femmes fatale in the style of Jugendstil. However, already  in 1915 he had made his first laconic (concise?) abstraction drawn with compass and ruler. Since 1923 Rodschenko concentrated on photography because of its documentary exactness. However , in the same year he created his eccentric often cryptic photo montages for Wladimir Majakowski’s love poems “pro eto”. With other works, like many of his colleagues  of the Russian avant-garde (Iwan Kljun, Kasimir Malewitsch, El Lissitzky), Rodtschenko moved continuously in an unexpected way between the objective and the subjective, what  the art critic Waldemar Maywei called the ‘non- constructive’ and the ‘konstructive’ pole of the artistic experience. This dynamic correlation in Rodtschenko’s aesthetic expression is particularly visible in his oil paintings of the 1910s. On one hand he created monochrome reductions like the series ‘Black on Black’ (1918) or ‘Red, Yellow, Blue’ (1921), and on the other hand he painted his nervous, galvanic expressions as, for example, in ‘Resolution of the Plain” (1921). [This work] ‘Kinetic composition’ can in fact be connected with the non-constructive as well as the constructive impulse. But without doubt there is a direct connection to the series of the cosmic ‘abstractions’, which Rodtschenko created in 1919-20. Generally, the work is in close connection to the topic of (outer) space like many experimental artists of the 1920′s imagined and depicted it (Kjun, Alexander Lobas, Wladimir Ljuschin, etc).

This interest in space developed through the tremendous popularity of Jules Verne and H G Wells in Russia, through the closeness of Komstantin Tziolkowski, the father of the Russian rocket science and through the belief in the abilities of technology.  It inspired many depictions of the stratosphere and space, for example, Malewitsch’s ethereal Suprematism (1918-19), Ljuschin’s drafts of an inter planetary space station from 1922, Iwan Kudriaschew’s forces racing through space (1923-25), and Michal Plaksin’s ‘Planetarium’ (1922).

Rodtschenko was also inspired by these journeys through space. Some of his abstract paintings can be interpreted as depictions of planetary bodies, of eclipse’s, or meteors against the infinite night sky. The painting ‘Kinetic Composition’ has a visual connection to Rodtschenko’s cosmic use of forms from 1919-20 and can at the same time be seen as a formal painting that foreshadows his action paintings of the 1940s. Although microscopic, what fascinates Rodtschenko is recognisable: the interplay of spheres on a monochrome background (black, brown, or grey), or the confrontation of unequal masses and the tension of an asymmetric composition and their symmetric formats. The result is a moving whole that vibrates and oscillates in a breathless tension like the Milky Way in an immaculate night sky.

How this particular “painting” made the transition to the truly kinetic form of the necktie may be lost in history. However, the exegesis above came with the tie. I am obliged to my friends Weston Naef (for the gift) and Christiane Keller (for the translation) for helping me plug this significant gap in our Art Historical knowledge.

Light Painting was widely hailed as the best work in the Biennale of Sydney – apparently also by Thierry de Duve, among others – but you have to have seen this work by Nyapanyapa Yunupigu to understand why its random streaming imagery is “beyond” the documentary potential of still photography. Then again, Will Stubbs’ explanatory label was also far and away the most thought-provoking piece of text generated by this guff-laden event… Equally interesting was the fact that the collective mode of its production suggests an entirely new mode of art-making coming out of Yirrkala. Collective agency is in their blood…

PS See what I mean here at Ros Oxley’s website…