Post War Australian Art - Essay Example

Postwar Australian Art Numerous Australian artists emerged during the post-war period between the 1950s and 1970s. These artists employed brilliant abstract studies, as well as a robust interest in the Australian landscape and overall spirituality. One of the most prominent post-war artists is Imants Tillers who is renowned for creating incredible artistic pieces. Imants has been influential in Australia’s art scene and has made use of his signature artistic style to delve into themes applicable to contemporary culture and the implications of migration (Coulter-Smith & Tillers 2002, p. 204). Imants’ greatest motivation is the production of pieces of artwork that show concerns regarding locality and place while also making evocations of the Australian landscape. Between 1974 and 1975, Imants produced Conversations with the bride. The piece of art typifies the installation media category. The installation provides a notable dialogue between Imants’ painting and Marcel Duchamp’s well known painting entitled The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. Duchamp’s painting is also referred to as The large glass. Imants’ Conversations with the bride is a compilation of at least 112 miniature photographs and paintings (Hart & Tillers 2006, p. 9). These photos and paintings are set on multiple aluminium tripods with every image in the compilation being appropriated from The large glass by Duchamp. In addition, Conversations with the bride also appropriates images of Hans Heysen’s water colour Summer of 1909, which had characteristic Australian landscape, consisting particularly of gum and eucalyptus trees. This calls to mind the magnificent forces of nature that is similar to the 19th century Romantic landscapes. The large glass and Summer were painted approximately the same time, and as a consequence, Imants perceives them as equally representative of Australian cultural values (Stephen 2003, p. 16). These art pieces were sympathetic to Imants’ views at the time, especially with regard to Imants’ feelings regarding the element of the fourth dimension, which is also evident in Duchamp’s artwork. Imants researches a lot of sources, collecting necessary documentations vital for the compilation of the images inherent in the Conversations with the bride compilation. Conversations with the bride represents the painter’s post-modern strategy, which encompasses approaches such as intertextuality. Here, Imants’ artistic work elucidates the link between the artwork, the viewer and the artist. This relationship is exemplified through the use of layering whereby contemporary and historic references from both literature and art are comingled (Hart & Tillers 2006, p. 13). Since the Second World War, notable art movements in Australia consisted of pop art, conceptual art, postmodernism, abstract impressionism and minimalism. Cultural and national events significantly influenced the popularity of these movements. Imants is one of Australia’s most renowned post-modern artists. His paintings mostly address national anxieties regarding Australia’s geographical, as well as cultural, distance from Europe. Conversations with the bride serves as a continuation of this artistic symbolism (Stephen 2003, p. 16). Imants is renowned for challenging the idea that Australia’s heritage was constructed on the premise of tyranny of distance. As a matter of fact, Imants’ work, including, Conversations with the bride, lay emphasis on the meaningfulness of Australian culture. Imants achieves this by developing close relations between culture and different ideologies, offering novel readings, as well as ownership, of these symbols as vital to the hybrid identity of Australia. The message of the artwork is effectively communicated owing to the generational conditions in Australia, which allowed for the establishment and development of cultural and individual identity. On the other hand, Conversations with the bride typifies the feminist art movement by making reference to the experiences and lives of women in the society. The incorporation of the feminine gender into the title of the artwork (bride) speaks to Imants’ consideration of women’s lives. This provides greater visibility to women’s lives and experiences in art history. The painting also coincides with the second wave of the feminist movement that flourished between the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, with regard to psychoanalytic representation, Conversations with the bride exemplifies Freud’s criticisms, which make an effort to discover the links between psychology and art (Tillers 2004, p. 6). Freud’s concept of psychoanalysis implies the examination of the concepts operating in art or texts in a manner that enriches the viewer’s understanding of the artwork, and if the viewer attempts to compose a paper about the artwork, to produce an expressive and logical psychoanalytic interpretation. In this regard, it is evident that the absence or presence of self is the mystery that underpins Imants’ artwork. His art is compelled by concerns regarding originality and origins and the interactions between self and others (Tillers 2005, p. 12). This explains Imants’ long-term strategy of appropriating images from art reproductions and re-working them to produce challenging art forms. In order to produce the emblematic piece of artwork, Imants made use of aluminium, gouache, type C photograph and synthetic polymer paint that was spread on paper. The dimensions of the art piece are quite variable across the 112 paintings. However, each painting is 12.7 x 18.3cm, mounted on 112 tripods whose individual height is 163cm. The art installation also consists of seven framed photographs with each frame measuring 43 x 58 x 3.3cm. The original setting of the artwork is such that the rear side of each image is a mirror. These mirrors are laid out at eye level, allowing the viewer to walk through and examine all the images (Tillers 2005, p. 7). However, there is no particular order to the images perhaps because different people can link different images. This typifies the idea of coupled moments where people observe and link different images based on the reflections they perceive of each image. This means that viewers play a vital role in Imants’ artwork as the mirrors allow the viewer to read him or herself into the context of the images (Coulter-Smith & Tillers 2002, p. 118). The installation of the artwork, therefore, allows the audience to become involved in the artwork. Imants allows for viewers to read themselves into the images’ context by providing high narrative content to all images. In essence, the relationship between the artist and the audience is enhanced by the artist’s incorporation of text into the presentation of the art installation. The narrative content allows for a silent conversation between the audience and the artist. References Coulter-Smith, G & Tillers, I 2002, The postmodern art of Imants Tillers: appropriation en Abyme, 1971-2001, Fine Art Research Centre, Southampton Institute, Sydney. Hart, D & Tillers, I 2006, ‘Imant Tillers: One world many visions, in Introduction: A work in progress, pg. 1-17, Ginninderra Press Publisher, Canberra. Stephen, A 2003, ‘Ian Burn and Imants Tillers in conversation’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 159, pp. 16. Tillers, I 2004, ‘When locality prevails’, Heat, no. 8, new series. Tillers, I 2005, Imants Tillers: Land beyond goodbye, exhibition catalogue, Sherman Galleries, Sydney. Read More