anything at all CURATOR PROFILE John Neylon

Catalogue Essay

Rub your eyes…

In David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon, the amateur naturalist, Mr Frazer, writes in his field notebook, ‘…the very habit and faculty that makes known to us what is known and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even with the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for. To see what is there.’ Frazer was giving expression to a colonial mindset struggling to make any sense of seeing lived existence in Australia for what it really was - not some inversion of European sensibilities but full of wonder and authentic purpose. He might have been talking about art in a contemporary age. Theorising, talking, writing about and enacting this thing called ‘art’ has become totally ubiquitous and reflexive. So much so that it has been claimed that we may be living in a Post Art era. ‘The Death of Art’ the art critic Arthur Danto called it. By this he meant the decline of a certain kind of art – an art which is created and sustained by theories about it. But, to paraphrase Malouf’s character, these very theories and explanations ‘that make known to us what is known’ often become reflexive frameworks which ensure that dimensions of new experience, thinking and feeling end up talking to the hands of reason, routine and fashion.

If ‘Art is Dead’ then ‘Long live Art’. Isn’t that how it is meant to go? Generations of counter-culture movements of the modern era (Fluxus, Pop et al) plus many individual artists of wit and passion have refused to ‘let art die’ by adhering to the idea that art has proper work to do in the world rather than become a willing party to supply-side aesthetics. But finding art a real job in a world where on one hand it is buried in a compost heap of mass consumerism and on the other hand elevated on a pedestal of spectacle, gigantism and celebrity – is a real challenge. One thing to come out of this however is a quietude and perhaps a rediscovery of art-based behaviour’s capacity to render lived experience meaningful and interesting. Because. Ticking away. Behind that noisy screen of desperately-seeking-an-audience-art is a truth that art can be from and about anything at all.

Much art of the last hundred years has operated on this principle. But it has been so easily derailed by a felt need to be clever, spectacular or even, relevant. So where does this leave the kind of art and artists represented in anything at all? Teetering on the edge one could say, because believing that art can be from and about anything at all is a heartbeat away from letting go of all coordinates and drifting into the void. But each artist makes things. And these things (call them art if you like) have a life of their own. Not necessarily because of some aesthetic self-referencing but because they trace their origins from some moment in time when something seen or experienced suggested something else. Added to this, the material form they take, matters absolutely - to the point where it is impossible to disengage artist from art work, idea from form. These works em-body the experience. To paraphrase the poet W.H. Auden, poetry (or art) makes nothing happen.

Consider Deidre But-Husaim’s image of a group of students gazing into a cavern. The various origins of this image lie in personal memory, an actual cavern (at Naracoorte), students observed and an ivy-clad wall behind a restaurant. In synthesising such diverse information, the artist became open to the possibilities of playing off solid and empty space about to be overwhelmed by a tsunami of greenery. In such a setting the students are cast as life travellers, faced with a leap in the dark with the faint reassurance of light in the distance. Aldo Iacobelli’s spectral woman on a bicycle has its origins in something casually noticed. ‘That woman’, he wondered, ‘Why does she ride so often past my house always with a basket of flowers?’ The unfolding story of a woman taking flowers to her husband’s grave became important to Iacobelli because his visual imagination and emotions took the steering wheel. So what is such a work about? A woman who takes flowers to her husband’s grave? Or is it the aboutness of the whole process? About a wife’s devotion? The artist’s noticing of a simple everyday event? It is essentially about the question, ‘why does something happen?

By accepting that anything has the potential to become art these artists in different ways have allowed circumstances rather than their ‘ideas’ to steer the course. They have recognised the ‘suchness of the moment’ when a sense of significance – or of something happening - alights like a bird onto a bough. Through such means we are invited to join these artists in rubbing our eyes to see things, or relationships between them, as if for the first time.

MEDIA CONTACT Beth Shimmin, Marketing and Development Executive, Central School of Art E [email protected] | T 8299 7300 | M 0401 975 546 | W acsa.sa.edu.au Page 1 of 2

anything at all CURATOR PROFILE John Neylon

Biography

Education

1966 Diploma of Teaching (Visual Art), SA School of Art 1982 Bachelor of Education, South Australian College of Advanced Education

Professional Experience

1984 – 2016 Inaugural Art Critic The Adelaide Review 2012 – 2016 Lecturer Contemporary Art History/Theory Adelaide Central School of Art 2016 Curator anything at all Adelaide Central Gallery, SALA 2012 – 2015 Art Critic The Review 2010 – 2015 Lecturer, National Tour, Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society 2015 Curator, The Real Thing: Robert Hannaford Still Lifes, Carrick Hill, Adelaide 2014 Curator, Through the Mirror Ball, BMG Art, Adelaide 2013 Curator tough(er) love, Adelaide Festival, Art Gallery in association with Country Arts SA 2000 – 2005 Lecturer Art History, Art Gallery of /Adelaide University 1988 – 2005 Head of Education, Art Gallery of South Australia

Judging Panel engagements include The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize, Whyalla Art Prize, City of Port Lincoln Art Prize, and the Heysen Prize.

Awards

2014 The Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2014 Scarlett Award for critical writing (contemporary sculpture) 2005 Ministers’ Award for Excellence in Arts Education

Publications

2016 ‘Robert Hannaford: Distinguishing Features’, exhibition catalogue essay for Robert Hannaford survey exhibition Art Gallery of South Australia 2016 ‘Catching the Light’, exhibition catalogue essay for Franz Kempf, Aspects of a Journey survey exhibition, State Library Adelaide 2015 Geoff Wilson: The Interrogated Landscape, Samstag Art Museum (contributing essay) 2015 The Edge of Time: Greg Johns Sculpture 1977 – 2015, Wakefield Press

Online writing projects

Online education content writer for Samstag Art Museum exhibitions: Colliding Worlds (2009); Mirror Mirror: Now and Then (2010); Stop (the) Gap, Indigenous art in motion (2011); White Rabbit: Contemporary Chinese Art (2011); Restless, 2012 Adelaide International; Beyond the Self (National Portrait Gallery touring exhibition) (2012); Jeffrey Smart (2012). www.unisa.edu.au/samstagmuseum

Media reviewing

Numerous art reviews and articles The Adelaide Review (TAR) & The Melbourne Review (TMR) and The Advertiser 1980s – 2016 (see http://www.adelaidereview.com.au/search/neylon)

MEDIA CONTACT Beth Shimmin, Marketing and Development Executive, Adelaide Central School of Art E [email protected] | T 8299 7300 | M 0401 975 546 | W acsa.sa.edu.au Page 2 of 2