Harry Hay

#124. Robin Greenwood writes on “Making Painting Abstract”

Noela James Bewry, untitled No. 5, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 100x162cm.

Some time ago I was invited by Myles Corley, the gallery director of Linden Hall Studio in Deal, Kent, to curate an exhibition of new abstract painting, chosen from my own personal point of view. I thought it was a good chance to consider what did or did not qualify as “abstract”, and to examine the activities of painters whom I thought were moving forwards in original ways. It was intended to publish the short essay that follows as part of a catalogue for the show, along with reproductions of paintings by the ten chosen artists, all to coincide with the opening of the exhibition on 4^th April 2020. Instead, due to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, I’m publishing the essay and the ten reproductions here on Abcrit.

This essay was written before I had seen much of the work, and was not intended as an analysis of any of the content in the paintings to be hung. More than anything, it was aimed to demonstrate my own enthusiasms for differences and divergences ongoing in original abstract painting. I was genuinely excited by the prospect of seeing some of these very different works together for the first time. The exhibition will hopefully still take place before too long. In the meantime, perhaps we can begin here to discuss the differences, achievements and ambitions of this work, with an example from each of the artists. There will be thirty or so paintings that will get hung eventually in the actual exhibition, but for the time being, we are reproducing here one work each from the ten artists: Noela James Bewry; John Bunker; EC; myself; Harry Hay; Patrick Jones; Dean Piacentini; John Pollard; Hilde Skilton; and Stephen Walker.

I’m hoping the artists themselves are fit and well, and (in their current self-isolation) will contribute to a discussion of their work on-line, along with anyone else who might find it makes for an interesting dialogue. Reproductions are never as good as the real thing, but it’s a start.

With thanks to all the artists for their enthusiasm in putting together this show; and I look forward to the real thing in Deal, when it happens.

Robin Greenwood

4^th April 2020

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#98. Harry Hay writes on “The Cringe” and Australia’s Peculiar Relationship to Abstract Art

“Would you Pay $1.3m for this?”, Herald, 17th Dec, 1973.

Heavy, with the Weight of History

On the 27^th March 2018, I contributed a comment to a long and smouldering debate on Abcrit, following the publication of Alan Gouk’s tremendous Key Paintings of the 20^th Century: Part 2. The comment read as follows:

I’m in no way suggesting that we are yet to see an abstract painting. I’m saying that there is no appetite for that as an un-compromised artistic pursuit in our current prevailing culture. Rather paradoxically, we have a situation where there are more “abstract painters” than ever before, but just as so many of these painters are capable of pulling off some rather good paintings, many are just as capable of drawing a smiley face into one of them the very next day. This is because there doesn’t seem to be any sense that a critically engaged audience is watching. Casualism is to a great extent born out of a perception that no one actually cares. This is very different to the climate that gave oxygen to the painters in your survey, Alan [Gouk], and from what I can gather, quite different to the critically engaged times you yourself came up in, able as you were to exchange ideas and have your work seen by the likes of Greenberg and Fried. The tide may already have been turning then, but it is at its lowest ebb now. The fact that we have to resort to google to try and find new or interesting artists is a massive indictment on how far things have fallen, and how isolated we all are.

Actually, I made this comment on the 28^th of March, because Australia is about eight or nine hours ahead of England, despite the general lament that we are ten to fifteen years behind in regards to everything else. Australia is no stranger to isolation. The illusive Southern Continent, that last piece of the imperial puzzle, a vast and sporadically populated landmass surrounded by endless sea. This is a place people were sent to so they would disappear. As Robert Hughes wrote in the Fatal Shore:

… transportation got rid of the dissenter without making a hero of him on the scaffold. He slipped off the map into a distant limbo, where his voice fell dead at his feet. There was nothing for his ideas to engage, if he were an intellectual; no machines to break or ricks to burn, if a labourer. He could preach sedition to the thieves and cockatoos, or to the wind. Nobody would care.

Eerily familiar. Barbarism aside, the most significant difference today, as I see it, is the repeated assurance that our voices matter and will be heard. The world has shrunk, so they say, and we’re all supposedly much more connected, and yet it feels as if we’re all just shouting over the top of each other, silencing ourselves in the process, creating a new breed of repression. In colonial Australia, repression was the local currency. We have always felt like this, and it contributes to the manifestation of The Cultural Cringe, that peculiar, archaic but ever present inferiority complex, the reverence for the ‘homeland’ suffered by post-colonial nations but particularly Australia. It’s a complex that has impeded our cultural development, devaluing everything we make here in favour of almost anything from Europe and America, because of our insecure and guilt ridden view of ourselves, born out of the knowledge that this isn’t really our country.

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#75. Harry Hay writes on Simon Gardam at Fort Delta, Melbourne

Installation, Simon Gardam at Fort Delta, Melbourne, Australia

Field, an exhibition of new paintings by Simon Gardam, is showing from August 3^rd – September 2^nd at Fort Delta, Melbourne, Australia

http://www.fortdelta.com.au/fort-delta-events-and-exhibitions/2016/06/17/simon-gardam-201/

This is Simon Gardam’s second solo exhibition at Fort Delta in little over a year, and in such a small space of time his work has undergone some significant transformations. The addition to Gardam’s repertoire of stitching paintings together is but one reason for this, and certainly not the most important when it comes to determining just how these paintings go about engaging us in a way that is very different to the last few years. I think the most consequential factor for bringing about this shift lies in the colour and how it sits on the surface. Gardam’s colour is brighter now than it has been in recent years and that has a lot to do with the immediacy of its application. Traces of older methods are still evident as well, able to co-exist with these newer developments, all in all contributing to a diverse selection of works, with physical and spatial differences occurring across all the paintings in this current exhibition, Field.

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#61. Harry Hay writes on Brancaster Chronicles at the Heritage Gallery, Greenwich

Brancaster discussion in progress, 10th April 2017. Photo John Pollard. Film of the discussions will be made available to view on the Brancaster Chronicles website (Branchron.com) shortly.

Brancaster Chronicles at Greenwich, at the Heritage Gallery is open 11, 12, 13 and 18, 19, 20 April 2017, 10am-6pm. https://branchron.com/news/

I paid my first visit to Maritime Greenwich in 2010. I was in my first year of art school, aspiring towards figuration and rather disinclined to pay much attention to abstract art at all. Turner was my favourite artist, and so I was rather drawn towards seeing some of the world he depicted. The uniform that Nelson died in after his wounding at Trafalgar is particularly resonant in my mind. It is hard to reflect, almost impossible in some ways, on how we get to where we are. How many moments are there along the way that lead us to change course so drastically, for we hardly seem to notice it as it happens. Some may say that the divide between Turner and abstract art is not such a huge leap. Well it certainly feels so in reflection. If we fast forward seven years, my reason for returning to Greenwich couldn’t really feel more disparate.

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#40. Harry Hay writes on Philip Guston, Henri Matisse and the Politics of the Idle.

Philip Guston, “Stranger”, 1964

“Why am I like this?” Oblomov asked himself almost with tears, hiding his head under the blanket again. “Why?”

After seeking in vain for the hostile source that prevented him from living as he should, as the ‘others’ lived, he sighed, closed his eyes, and a few minutes later drowsiness began once again to benumb his senses… He was passing from agitation to his normal state of calm and apathy… So he never arrived at the cause, after all; his tongue and lips stopped in the middle of the sentence and remained half open. Instead of a word, another sigh was heard, followed by the sound of the even snoring of a man who was peacefully asleep.

From Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, first published 1859.

When David McKee gallery closed its doors in 2015, representation of Philip Guston’s estate was passed over to Hauser & Wirth, who celebrated this coup with an exhibition of his abstract work from 1957-67 at their gallery in New York, which is where I saw it in June this year. I want to make it very clear that this is not a review. The moment has passed and I have no particular desire to pick apart this grouping of works, which was mainly comprised of greyscales, floating ‘heads’ and the pure drawings he made in Florida while having some sort of an artistic crisis. The whole exhibition seemed to be accompanied by something of a concession that this is not really Guston’s best work, and that it is simply interesting to see the hints and suggestions at what would come later, what we are all yearning for, the return to figuration. This is really problematic on so many levels, not least the assumption that the late figurative works are any good, but that it also seems that the only way an artist’s voice can be ‘heard’ is by having something to ‘say’, and that the only way to ‘speak’ in art is to deal in recognisable imagery. But as fascinating as Hieroglyphics are, they are not paintings, and I question the extent to which any painting reveals itself through the conventions of language. Sure, it is subject to certain rules and conventions, but it is we who use language to understand what those conventions and meanings are. We interpret, but the painting imparts nothing directly. This is what Guston seems to struggle with in his later work, however open-ended the narrative connotations of his imagery may be. His frustration with abstract painting is well documented, “The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, then going into a frustrated fury about everything, and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue? I thought there must be some way I could do something about it. I knew ahead of me a road was laying. A very crude, inchoate road. I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid… Wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt.” [i] I have some sympathy for this frustration, and yet many a painter before Guston has lived through equally tumultuous times, and yet still managed to remain committed to achieving their aims most appropriate to the chosen discipline.

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