Education Resource Apocalyptic Horse 5 March – 15 September 2019

© 2019 Heide Museum of Modern Art. This material may be downloaded, copied, used and communicated free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes provided all acknowledgements are retained.

Albert Tucker, Apocalyptic Horse 1956 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation Courtesy of Sotheby's Australia

The Albert & Barbara Tucker Gallery The Albert and Barbara Tucker Gallery was established to host a series of changing exhibitions related to the life and work of Albert Tucker. In-depth explorations of the themes and periods of Tucker’s oeuvre alternate with projects that examine his work within an historical, art historical, theoretical or contemporary context. Apocalyptic Horse is part of this ongoing series. Curator Jake Treacy has brought together lesser known works from the Heide Collection, positioned them alongside contemporary artists, and made them accessible to the public.

Artists Albert Tucker Sidney Nolan James Gleeson Patricia Piccinini Hayley Millar-Baker Asher Bilu David and Hermia Boyd

Curator Biography Jake Treacy is a curator, writer and poet whose practice employs numinous acts through exhibition-making, performativity, and the spoken and written word. He is a University of Melbourne graduate with a Master of Art Curatorship (2017) and Postgraduate Diploma of Art History (2013). Jake has co-directed an artist-run initiative, sat on grant advisory panels, and published on numerous contemporary arts practices. He has curated several commissioned group exhibitions in both art galleries and non-conventional public spaces, as well as participating in a creative symposia and performing poetic dissertations. His practice examines ways of constructing liminal experiences in order to incur healing, promote inclusivity and community, and exercise the therapy of art.

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This education resource is designed to support students of VCE Art:

Unit 3, Area of Study 1 Interpreting art In this area of study students respond to and critically interpret the meanings and messages of artworks. They develop, examine and analyse their own and others’ opinions and use evidence to support different points of view. Students undertake research to support their analysis and critique. Using appropriate terminology, they compare artworks produced before 1990 with artworks produced since 1990. When selecting artworks for study, it is recognised that the Analytical Frameworks can be applied to all artworks in varying degrees. Students demonstrate depth of analysis by drawing on specific aspects of the frameworks to support their interpretations of artworks.

Students must undertake:  the study of at least one artist, their artistic practice and artworks produced before 1990, and at least one artist, their artistic practice and artworks produced since 1990  a comparison of the artists with detailed analysis of at least two artworks by each artist  the application of relevant aspects of the Analytical Frameworks across each of the selected artworks to interpret the meanings and messages.

Unit 3, Outcome 1 On completion of this unit the student should be able to use the Analytical Frameworks to analyse and interpret artworks produced before 1990 and since 1990, and compare the meanings and messages of these artworks. To achieve this outcome the student will draw on key knowledge and key skills outlined in Area of Study 1.

Key knowledge Exhibition and resource content

 contexts of artworks produced before 1990 and since  Apocalyptic Horse includes 17 paintings and 1990 photographs produced before 1990, and 8  the characteristics of artworks produced before 1990 photographs and sculptures produced since 1990. and since 1990 Curator Jake Treacy has suggested pre and post  the Structural Framework, the Personal Framework, the 1990 pairings for student comparison. Cultural Framework and the Contemporary Framework  The exhibition lends itself well to use of the  resources available to support research of selected Analytical Frameworks from the perspective of the artists and artworks artists and curator as well as the viewer.  terminology used in the analysis, interpretation,  This resource supports student research of artists, comparison and contrast of artworks. artworks, and contemporary curatorial practice, and uses appropriate language and terminology. Key skills  compare the contexts and characteristics of artworks produced before 1990 with artworks produced since 1990  apply the Structural Framework, the Personal Framework, the Cultural Framework and the Contemporary Framework to the analysis and interpretation of the meanings and messages of artworks  substantiate interpretations of artworks with evidence taken from the artworks themselves and with reference to a range of resources  use appropriate terminology in the analysis, interpretation, comparison and contrast of artworks.

This resource will also support students in their Unit 4 studies. It is also relevant to Studio Arts, with regard to the Structural Framework, and Industry Contexts.

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In conversation with Jake Treacy, Exhibition Curator

Apocalyptic Horse is an exhibition exploring psychology, the body and the landscape—and the theatre that ties them together—through the artistic practice of Albert Tucker. The project takes its title from a 1956 painting by Tucker in which surrealistic tropes gallop through a nightmarish world. Using this image as a starting point, the exhibition navigates lines of convergence and displacement within the Australian landscape and psyche. Tucker’s work is brought into dialogue with work by other artists including Patricia Piccinini, Hayley Millar-Baker and James Gleeson, offering a prism through which histories can be reexamined, and ideas of apocalypse—both personal and collective—can be explored.

During his travels through Europe, Tucker was investigating the influences of modernism, through creative experimentation and social observation. He was living in Rome in 1954 when his friend Sidney Nolan visited and brought with him a suite of photographs that were commissioned by the Brisbane Courier Mail. These photographs documented the two-year-long drought that had afflicted the Northern Territory and Queensland outback, depicting an arid land strewn with the carcasses of cattle and horses. The images are haunting at say the least—suggesting a surrealistic stage upon which sculptural effigies perform a danse macabre—and certainly left a lasting impressing on both artists. Tucker was inspired by Nolan’s photographs and in turn created his painting Apocalyptic Horse in 1956.

Sidney Nolan Untitled (Calf Carcass in Tree) 1952 Untitled (Desiccated Horse Carcass Sitting Up) 1952 Untitled (Horse Head on Ground) 1952 archival inkjet prints 23 x 23cm Heide Museum of Modern Art. Purchased with funds from the Truby and Florence Williams Charitable Trust, ANZ Trustees 2011

Nolan’s photographs could be seen as a colonial reflection of encountering the Australian landscape from a foreign perspective, conveying the land as an unforgiving, seemingly inhospitable and uninhabitable space. Contrary to this viewpoint, Bruce Pascoe, of the Bunurong clan, of the Kulin nation, writes in his book Dark Emu (2016) of Australia as having a thousands-of-years-old agricultural tradition, in which grain harvests supported First Nations people all the way up until 1875. According to settler journals, 100-500 Indigenous peoples were witnessed using their traditional knowledge of seasons, migrations and astrology to successfully farm the land.

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Nolan’s photographs, however, taken less than 80 years later, present an arid and rather apocalyptic vista devoid Modernism refers to a global movement in society of inhabitants. ‘This is our great desert, the dead heart and culture that from the early decades of the of Australia,’ Pascoe describes the settler sentiment twentieth century sought a new alignment with the upon witnessing Aboriginal agriculture; ‘It goes against experience and values of modern industrial life. our mythology that insists on its hostility to humans. Our Building on late nineteenth-century precedents, poets laud the emptiness as a psychological marker for artists around the world used new imagery, all Australians.’ materials and techniques to create artworks that they felt better reflected the realities and hopes of Flying over the Australian continent in 1947, Tucker modern societies. noted of the landscape that ‘neither man nor beast could live there.’ This experience became a psychological marker for the artist, one that would inform the trajectory of his practice while abroad in Europe years later, from where he recalled the arid and rocky façade of Australia in his landscape paintings. Often wounded and scarred with gashes, these paintings carry with them the memory of a fragile ecology marked by colonial contact and the anxieties reside in the cultural, social and geological landscapes.

I see the exhibition as an undulating landscape for viewers to traverse. My independent curatorial practice seeks ways to dismantle the tradition of the ‘white cube’—a museum construct understood by Irish art critic, writer and academic Brian O’Doherty as a framework to remove the art object from any aesthetic or historical context whilst displayed within the gallery. Within O’Doherty’s white cube, viewers are asked to check-in their histories and lived experiences along with their backpacks upon entering. Such a white cube seeks to architecturally and psychically deny the outside world any entry, an idea which I refute. In fact, I Installation view, Apocalyptic Horse 2019 would implore visitors to bring with them into the Photograph: Christian Capurro gallery a sense of exploration.

Apocalyptic Horse is more a thematic exhibition than a historical exhibition, and encourages viewers to navigate their own lines of enquiry, drawing links between works that span across time, culture and place. I see this as an important and contemporary way to curate—that is, to care for the life of art works that speak beyond chronology, geography, and other categories of the museum as academy. The places in which art is presented should illuminate new ways of seeing and new, humbler ways of thinking. Contemporary curatorial practices should seek out more ethical ways in which art is presented and communicated, allowing for more pluralistic histories to inform how we understand the past and provide platforms in the present. At times, this exhibition challenges the status quo of the patriarchal nature of western history, for instance, and how this has prejudiced certain ways in which art has been presented to us in the past.

I invite the viewer to carry their existing knowledge of the world beyond and to become an active participator in navigating this imagined landscape.

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In the painting Apocalyptic Horse we see the sinuous, leathery-skin of a creature that emerges from the limbo of a lurid yellow field. The horse is a fraught symbol that gallops through a nightmarish world, and the texture of its flesh is repeated in other landscapes Tucker painted in the late 1950s, such as Wounded Landscape (1958) and Cratered Head (1960), which are also in this exhibition.

The sinuous skin and ravines of Apocalyptic Horse are echoed visually in the cluster of landscape paintings displayed a little way down the gallery. They have been hung in the gallery in a tessellation, presenting abstracted vistas of the arid and rocky landscape often witnessed in central Australia, and in this way they suggest undulating layers of imagined earth, which in this context can also be seen as psychological strata.

When we stand before this mountainous edifice of paintings, we may ask ourselves: Where does the viewer stand in the landscape’s history? When we think about Albert Tucker, Apocalyptic Horse 1956 strata of sediment, rock, and earth, we may consider what Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney the land may have seen, the layers of history that lie upon © Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation Courtesy of Sotheby's Australia each other, their stories co-mingling. Tucker has created these landscapes in impasto style, using thick, viscous paint to build up layer upon layer. By mixing fast-drying acrylic paint with sand and PVA, Tucker was able to replicate the textures of the Australia outback, and then mine into painterly ground using sharpened tools and sanders in order to crater the surface—in this way, he would scar the landscapes. Tucker made these paintings whilst living in Rome, where he met Italian artist Alberto Burri, whose experiments with exaggerated craquelure techniques inspired Tucker. These works are abstracted views of landscape painting, seemingly unforgiving and remote, both visually and also psychically. Tucker himself was remembering and reimagining parts of the Australian landscape from afar, recalling its textures and atmosphere from his memory.

Landscapes in this exhibition have been sourced from the Tucker Foundation Collection and the Heide Collection, to provide scope to Tucker’s practice from the mid-1950s. Lunar Landscape is one of the works on loan from the Tucker Foundation and is an excellent example of the impasto technique employed by Tucker. Interestingly, another lunar landscape painting was purchased from Tucker by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In this exhibition, the scars and wounds evident in Lunar Landscape start to take on uncanny dimensions, and human features begin to Installation view, Apocalyptic Horse 2019 Photograph: Christian Capurro

Heide Museum of Modern Art Education Resource: Apocalyptic Horse 5 emerge from the craters, fissures and holes of the canvas. The psychological phenomenon pareidolia describes the human tendency to see faces in the abstract. In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters:

"If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers, combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well-conceived forms."

Following the suite of cratered landscapes, wounded landscapes, lunar landscapes, exhibition viewers arrive at PH Balance: pH balance is used to rank Wounded Head (1983). This is quite a small work in solutions in terms of acidity. Testing the pH comparison, and it hasn’t been exhibited before at Heide, yet levels of paper will determine whether it is it exemplifies the artistic exploration of surreally binding the acidic or not. With a scale of 0-14, anything psyche and the landscape. I had this work reframed for two with a pH value of 0-7 is considered acidic, reasons. Firstly, by retiring its existing, rather overtly- and 7-14 is basic (alkaline). Any framing decorative 1980s style frame, we are able to assist in the used around an artwork should be archival, preservation of the painting by replacing the frame with up- which means using acid-free papers, to-date archival materials such as acid-free matt board, which mounts and glues. Using acid-free materials is pH-balanced, ensuring its longevity far into the future; and prevents visible aging. secondly, by reframing the work I hope to celebrate its painterly qualities and historical context. The new frame was inspired by an existing mid-century frame from another Tucker painting (Lunar Landscape, hung next to Wounded Head), which allows the work’s modernist origins and influences to speak with contemporary conservation practices.

Many of the works I have discussed speak of geographic and psychological apocalypse, but I have also carefully included contrasting works that may be seen as tools for healing. Much of my curatorial practice focuses on art as therapy, and I acknowledge pluralistic arts practices. Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural relief Belly (2012) offers a confronting, uncanny, yet nurturing expansion of the traditional, modernist square canvas, transforming it instead into the fleshy undercarriage of a mammal. Piccinini was inspired by the belly of a wombat in the creation of this piece. Its furry Installation view, Apocalyptic Horse 2019 composition, potentially evoking bodily orifices, Photograph: Christian Capurro may appear like a hairy face with wet eyes and punctum mouth. The materials used to make this work include silicone and human hair, combined to convey ideas of nurturing and tenderness pertaining to femininity. The work speaks of matrilineal knowledge and the fleshy, celebratory and generous offerings bestowed from motherhood. Due to its innate feminism I’ve placed this work in direct conversation with Albert Tucker’s Cratered Head (1959-60). The dialogue that emerges may be juxtaposing, however the stylistic semblances of faces surrealistically transpiring from natural environments (one being the body, the other being the landscape), theatrically bind psyche to nature, and identity to landscape.

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Piccinini’s Bootflower is another hybrid figure pertaining to motherhood. This sculpture sits at the end of the gallery, closely guarding her clutch of eggs atop a nest of packing pallets. As a curious audience, viewers are invited to witness this intimate scene of maternal devotion, embraced by the warm, womb-like glow of the window, which has been treated in a membrane-like film. In a gesture similar to that of Tucker’s Apocalyptic Horse, Bootflower too turns her head, however this time returning the viewer’s gaze with love and tenderness. The packing pallets she sits upon are made from urban detritus, implying that we must evolve in our changing environments in order to best survive. Here she nurtures her eggs, a symbol for hope and future prospects. Bootflower can be interpreted as a genetic hybrid of human, flora and object—the traditional stitching and heel of a cowboy boot manifesting in the upper part of the sculpture. The flower-like head and face is reminiscent of a reproductive organ, while the the strong equine neck and mane could be seen as animalia. This interpretation evokes the idea of ‘opening up like a flower’ and encourages us to become more accepting of our differences. As Piccinini says, her work is about ‘being able to find beauty in a world which can never be perfect.’1

Further explorations of biomorphic imagery are conjured in James Gleeson’s Black Truce (1987), an immersive painting over 2.5 metres in length. Employing surrealist tropes and techniques, Gleeson taps into the subconscious to unveil a psychological landscape, referred to as a psychoscape, which seeks to manifest a state of mind and visually articulate the artist’s psyche. To some the painting may appear apocalyptic in nature, with whirling, tumultuous elements, reminiscent of a cave or a seascape with vaporous clouds that merge into fleshy anthropomorphisms. The viewer is invited to look inward and to make their own personal interpretations as this dreamscape speaks to those desires or traumas that may lie dormant beneath the surface of consciousness. Much of Gleeson’s oeuvre, for instance, explored and reflected upon homoeroticism and his own Psychoscape: in painting surrealistic landscapes, homosexuality. Early works depicted swirling cloudscapes Gleeson coined the term psychoscape to describe blotted in inks with collaged male nudes that were his dreamlike, often apocalyptic panoramas that sourced from physique magazines and arranged include familiar yet unrecogniseable forms. His floating in heavenly desire. Over the course of his artistic psychoscapes show liquid, solid and air coming practice the human form became more and more together and allude to the interrelationships abstracted, until he gestured to it at times by only an eye between the conscious, subconscious and or a hand. Here in Black Truce the human form in all its unconscious mind. bodily eroticism is no longer discerned from nature, instead coalescing into oneness.

Gleeson explores the human condition beyond the limitations of reality. His surrealist painting of fleshy biomorphic forms is an apocalyptic evocation of human nature and of homoerotic desire, where bodily organs erupt from a liquid landscape surging with sexual tension and danger. This is a realm that exists beyond the expectations of forms, where vaporous, liquid and solid masses come together, congealing without discernment between gender, body and landscape. By exploring the undulating nature of psychology, this painting presents sexual identity as a landscape threatening and beautiful, filled with coalescing energy and desire that lies just beneath the surface of things. In 2002 Gleeson said of this dreamscape, ‘I wanted to show how threatening forms can be really quite beautiful.’2 Like Piccinini’s Bootflower, Gleeson’s Black Truce seeks out beauty in a world that can never be perfect. Piccinini has mentioned that she draws upon Gleeson as one of her artistic influences, which enhances the dialogue between their works in this exhibition.

1 Source: http://patriciapiccinini.net/writing/5/213/22# 2 James Gleeson, 17 August 2002.

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Exhibited in close proximity to James Gleeson’s painting and flying out beyond its expansiveness is a small work by David and Hermia Boyd. Partners in life and in work the Boyds typically used terracotta and earthenware clay to make wheel-thrown forms that were both functional and decorative. As seen here, they often glazed and incised their ceramics using a technique called sgraffito. This incising technique cuts into the wet clay before it is dried and fired in a refined manner similar to the way in which Albert Tucker cuts into the drying paint of his

Installation view, Apocalyptic Horse 2019 wounded canvases. This hand-crafted vessel bears the Photograph: Christian Capurro medieval-inspired symbol of a religious harbinger. A winged-figure sitting upon a horse—perhaps an angel on horseback—often appears in spiritual texts as a messenger foretelling of celestial news or of an impending apocalypse, such as the end of days. Conversely, this motif can also be interpreted as a herald of love and transformation. The ancient Greeks, for example, often depicted Eros, the God of Love, riding a horse. This little ceramic work has been sourced from the Heide Collection and is exhibited nearby a poem by James Gleeson. By coupling the objects together it evokes creative sensibilities beyond their museum categorisations of date, material and maker, and encourages viewers to draw new lines of vision across the gallery as guided by literary and visual motifs.

Alongside the Boyds’ religious harbinger, the next suite of works lays bare the ordeal of forced religious assimilation through colonisation. Hayley Millar-Baker is a Gunditjmara artist whose photographic work combines new images with those from her family archives. Millar-Baker also draws upon her Gundjitmara bloodlines and landscape. Her work highlights strength and resilience across time and place, acknowledging the complexities of contemporary Aboriginality and the trauma of colonisation.

The photo-collages in The Trees Have No Tongues are composites of pictures found in her family archives, and newly photographed images of locations on and away from Country. The series depicts the upheaval that Christianity and the Aboriginal Mission Stations had on three generations of women in her family. Millar-Baker refers to these works as ‘a portal to the in-between’ and describes how they tell of:

“… thousands of years of cultural practices that were dismantled as a result of the introduction of Christianity and the irreparable trauma that ensued. Christianity’s guise as the saving grace for the future of a new nation led to the detachment of identity for my family. The heaviness of their spirits scarred the places they touched leaving behind remnants of their stories...”

Millar-Baker describes these works as some of her most personal yet, retelling intergenerational stories from three of her grandmothers, and her desire to share these stories with the public as a form of education about the on-going apocalyptic nature of religious assimilation. Offering this space to an Aboriginal arts practitioner is an opportunity to decolonise the space through their voice and knowledge. It demonstrates the complexities and celebrations of Aboriginality now.

Located nearby these photographs is another work by Millar-Baker that was installed at the beginning of the exhibition but has since been withdrawn at the artist’s request. A circle of light marks the physical absence of the sculpture Meeyn Meerreeng (Country at Night) 2017, which comprised seventy-one volcanic rocks collected from Country by the artist’s mother and then cleansed and painted black by Millar-Baker to protect their sacred story.

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Due to the conditions of display and in acknowledgment of the work’s cultural and spiritual significance, the installation has since been respectfully withdrawn from the exhibition.

This is to return the sacred rocks to Country, where they may rest and restore. Millar-Baker had intuitively arranged the rocks in a circular formation with larger rocks protecting smaller ones. For her they spoke of the ‘connection and disconnection of Country, of the moon, and a spiritual regeneration provided by the night sky’. The artist and I see the circle of light as indicative of ongoing discussions of inclusive spaces and creating healing paths that are First Nations-focused. Acting as a trace or echo of the sculpture, this luminous marker continues the conveyance of Indigenous knowledge originally carried through Meeyn Meerreeng. Installation view, Apocalyptic Horse 2019 Photograph: Christian Capurro

Installed at the entrance of the gallery, hung high on the wall, is Asher Bilu’s painting Full Moon (1959). Asher Bilu was born in Tel-Aviv, travelling across seas and land to migrate to Australia in 1956. His art practice explores cosmology and spirituality, examining our experience of light. The placement of Full Moon is a poetic gesture to communicate the idea that even within the darkest landscape there is a light that may guide our way. This idea operates on both a cosmological level as well as a social or political one. In many cultures the moon symbolises cosmic feminine knowledge and here encourages visitors to trust their intuition in navigating and reading the exhibition. The moon controls the ocean’s tides, and therefore brings land masses closer or further apart. As humans we are mostly comprised of water and the moon also controls our tides, influencing how we interact with each other emotionally, moving us closer and further away from one another.

The choice of wall text aims to be both educative and emotive. I wanted to deliver certain key facts through some dates, places, and techniques—using technical language sparsely as to not isolate certain visitors, however allowing for these important words and facts to be integrated with more emotive, or poetic language. These interpretative panels also include some direct quotes from the exhibiting artists to offer further insight to their practices and the exhibited works. I see this as a dialectical way to inspire, and maybe ignite imagination—dismantling certain art history conventions and instead offering a space for public enquiry. Through this gesture I hope to make the exhibition as inclusive as possible. Installation view, Apocalyptic Horse 2019 Photograph: Christian Capurro My intention is for each visitor to navigate this exhibition as an undulating landscape, where there is no prescribed pathway to walk and view the works. Instead, the juxtaposition of works allows new ways of seeing that are unique to each viewer—to forge new affinities particular to our own history, experience and knowledge. In doing so, I hope that audiences are able to draw new interpretations of the works beyond the fields of academia and without the prerequisite of ‘book-smarts.’ Instead, I hope to encourage personal responses guided by emotional intelligence.

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GLOSSARY

Anthropomorphism The depiction or treatment of animals, gods, and objects as if they are human in appearance, character, or behaviour. Alice in Wonderland, and Winnie-the-Pooh include classic examples of anthropomorphism.

Apocalyptic Showing or describing the total destruction and end of the world, or extremely bad future events.

Assimilation The absorption and integration of people, ideas, or culture into a wider society or culture.

Biomorphic A painted, drawn, or sculptured free form or design suggestive in shape of a living organism, especially an ameba or protozoan.

Coalescing Coming together to form one mass or whole.

Colonisation The action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area.

Composites Something made up of several parts or elements.

Craquelure A network of fine cracks in the paint or varnish of a painting.

Danse Macabre From French, and also called the Dance of Death, the Danse Macabre is an artistic genre using symbolism to highlight the universality of death, no matter one’s station in life.

Dialectical Relating to the logical discussion of ideas and opinions.

Effigies Sculptures or models that encapsulate an idea.

Impasto The process or technique of laying on paint or pigment thickly so that it stands out from a surface.

Juxtaposition The act of positioning two contrasting things being seen or placed close together to highlight their differences.

Motif A dominant or recurring idea in an artistic work.

Oeuvre An artist’s body of work.

Pareidolia The human tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

Harbinger Someone or something, which precedes and gives notice of the coming of some other person or thing; a forerunner; a precursor, an omen or indication of something to come.

Sgraffito/scraffito Is a technique used in ceramics, by applying to an unfired ceramic body two successive layers of contrasting slip or glaze, and then scratching into it to reveal parts of the underlying layer.

Surrealism According to poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in ‘an absolute reality, a surreality.’ James Gleeson is a prominent Australian surrealist artist.

Tesselation An arrangement of shapes closely fitted together, especially of polygons in a repeated pattern without gaps or overlapping.

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Apocalyptic Horse Using the Analytical Frameworks

The Structural Framework is used to analyse how the style, symbolism and structural elements of artworks contribute to the meanings and messages conveyed.

The Personal Framework is used to reveal how artworks can reflect an artist’s personal feelings, thinking and life circumstances and how the viewer’s interpretations are influenced by their life experiences.

The Cultural Framework is used to identify the influence on an artwork of the context of time, place and the society in which it was made.

The Contemporary Framework is used to interpret how contemporary ideas and issues influence the making, interpretation and analysis of artworks from both the past and present.

Use the Analytical Frameworks to analyse and interpret artworks produced before 1990 and since 1990, and compare the meanings and messages of these artworks

 Students respond to and critically interpret the meanings and messages of artworks.  Develop, analyse and examine their own and others opinions.  Use evidence to support different points of view.  Compare artworks produced before 1990 with those produced since 1990.  Study of one artist and their practice before 1990 and one artist and their practice after 1990.  Compare the artists with analysis of two artworks by each artist.  Apply relevant aspects of all Analytical Frameworks.

Curator Jake Treacy has paired a selection of artworks from Apocalyptic Horse for students to interpret using the Analytical Frameworks and considering the juxtaposition of works produced pre and post 1990.

The first paired examples of Tucker’s Apocalyptic Horse and Piccinini’s Bootflower have been completed and further suggestions for comparison are provided for further student investigation.

Study for Apocalyptic Horse 1955 fibre-tipped pen 16.2 x 22.2cm sheet © Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation. Courtesy of Sotheby’s Australia

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Albert Tucker, Apocalyptic Horse 1956 Patricia Piccinini, Bootflower 2015 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Photograph: Christian Capurro © Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of Sotheby's Australia

Background Information

Apocalyptic Horse Bootflower Albert Tucker (1956) Patricia Piccinini (2015)

Materials: oil on board Materials: silicone, fibreglass, human hair, wooden pallets Dimensions: 62 x 81cm board; 79.4 x 97.8 x 3.2cm frame Dimensions: 103 x 100 x 60 cm

Albert Tucker (1914-1999) is a key figure in the Patricia Piccinini (born 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is an development of Australian modernism in Melbourne, and Australian artist who completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the recognition of Australian art internationally. Primarily a Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1991. She who figurative painter, he produced works that responded to works in a variety of media including painting, video, sound, the world around him and his own life experiences and installation, digital prints, and sculpture. Concepts Piccinini often reflected critically on society. explores in her work include the artificial vs the natural; connection and empathy; diversity; unnamed emotions; and Tucker grew up during the Depression and began his wonder. Piccinini’s work responds to issues of genetic career as a young artist in the late 1930s, in the years engineering and scientific advances that cast binaries such as leading up to the outbreak of World War II. At this time his ‘natural and unnatural’ into question. world was defined by financial insecurity, social inequality and war and these concerns became the catalyst for much In the artist’s own words: of his painting. Influenced by his peers as well as European ‘I am interested in relationships: the relationship between the modernism, he developed an expressive style through artificial and the natural, between humans and the which he communicated his disillusionment about society environment. The relationships between beings, within during wartime. Imagery in his work from the 1940s also families and between strangers. And the relationship between derived from his first-hand experiences of the horrors of the audience and the artwork. My work is never about one war. In 1942 he was based at the Heidelberg Military thing alone, it is always about a family or an ecosystem. Even Hospital as an illustrator for medical records and there saw when a creature is alone there is a relationship with the soldiers suffering from horrific injuries and psychological viewer.’ damage. Often dark, ominous and unsettling, his wartime paintings interweave his pessimistic thoughts about war, “This is a world where things mix and intermingle, where life and society. nothing stays in its place. It is a world where animal, plant, machine and human unite and commingle. We have to ask ‘From the Depression (1928–33) to the first years of WWII ourselves, if it is so hard to figure out where one thing starts (1939–41), Australia was ruled by a conservative and another ends, can we really continue to believe in the government that displayed little interest in art unless it barriers that separate us.’ served a practical political purpose... As a result most

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artists at the time lived in total financial poverty and ‘In a world where the cultural and the natural—the suffered poverty of spirit.’ technological and organic—are ever more intermingled, this wilderness is my symbolic representation of a place where Barrett Reid, ‘Making it new in Australia’ in Angry Penguins technology has become so natural that it takes on a life of its & Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, exhibition own.” catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, 1988 ‘This will sound very strange—it is not really science itself that In the post-war years from 1947–57 Tucker lived and I am interested in, as much as how it impacts on people. I worked in Europe. In the mid-1950s his focus took a major think my creatures are actually more mythological than shift away from the city to the Australian outback. Inspired scientific. They are chimeras that I construct in order to tell by photographs of the Queensland drought that Sidney stories that explain the world that I live in but cannot totally Nolan had shown him in Italy in 1954, Tucker began to understand or control. Like most myths they are often paint Australia from afar. He was interested in the cautionary tales, but they are also often celebrations of these harshness of the Australian landscape and depicted the extraordinary beasts.’ outback as a seemingly uninhabitable barren wasteland. His paintings created during the 1950s and 1960s reveal ‘I think if people are disturbed by my work it is because it asks his admiration for the Italian painter Alberto Burri, whom questions about fundamental aspects of our existence—about he had met in Rome. Inspired by the textural quality of our artificiality, about our animalness, about our polyvinyl acetate Burri used to create his evocative built- responsibilities towards our creations, our children and our up surfaces, Tucker began to utilise the flexible and environment—and these questions should be easy to answer leathery toughness of this new material in his work. but they are not. What I love is when people argue over what the work is trying to say, when they begin the process of Tucker also admired the way Picasso ‘disintegrated the examining the issues from a number of perspectives. I love image, pulled it completely to pieces and kept putting it watching a person move from an initial sense of revulsion back together in different ways’. Apocalyptic Horse echoes against the strangeness of my creations towards a sense of Picasso’s use of the skull as a symbol of death and understanding or sympathy. I love it when people realise that destruction in his work during World War II. It is also all this stuff is actually about our lives today.’ strikingly similar to the horse in Picasso’s famous 1937 anti-war painting Guernica. ‘Both possess the same ‘It seems to me that so much that it bad in world comes from confronting, twisted profile, with teeth exposed and enforcing boundaries, insisting on purity. Of course this is nostrils flared in a nightmarish expression of terror.’ simplistic but it resonates with me. These objects are tributes to the idea of hybridity, celebrations of life without any For more information, visit: particular notion of what it should be.’ https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/286.1 For more information, visit: 982/ https://www.patriciapiccinini.net/writing

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Education Resource: Apocalyptic Horse 13

Structural Framework

The expressionistic, distorted figure of a horse disrupts the The conventions of hyper-realism and surrealism converge in contrasting bold, flat area of colour of the background. The the uncanny sculpture of Bootflower. Piccinini and her viewer is given no clue as to the landscape or scenery and technical team have perfectly replicated the colour, tone and is instead confronted with a lurid yellow, roughly layered texture of human skin and hair, wielding silicone to appear as over blue to create a sickly tone. The symbolism in skin, complete with freckles, veins and hair. Her use of actual Tucker’s choice of colour highlights his apparent horror at human hair that appears both as hair and as a mane highlights the harshness of the Australian landscape. The ravaged that this creature is both recognisable and foreign. Its scale shape of the horse is made prominent by the stark situates it in the realm of our world, despite its apparent contrast between figure and ground, and it appears to be otherworldliness. The creature twists around to ‘look’ at the stranded in space. The illusion of texture is created viewer through what is clearly substituted for a head: the through Tucker’s use of light and shadow and he was form of a hybrid flower and the more hidden form of a beginning to experiment with actual texture, which can be cowboy boot. The flesh of the head differs from the flesh of seen in the paint around the horse’s teeth. The viewer’s the body, being more similar to pig than human flesh, and eye is drawn to the focal point of the void of the horse’s much hairier than the rest of its body. What appear to be eye socket, which appears to look menacingly down at the tongues poke out as if in jest at the pun of footwear also viewer. The viewer’s eye then travels in an outward spiral having tongues. A ‘tattoo’ made from hair echoes the stitched around its facial features; flared nostrils, grimacing teeth pattern of a cowboy boot on the creature’s back, conjuring and severe veins, to notice the exaggerated proportions of images of animal branding and brings to mind the crass the horse’s head compared to the simplified form of its expression ‘tramp stamp’ used to describe lower back tattoos scrawny, contorted body. This painting was based on a on women. Piccinini describes the creature as she, but nothing series of photographs of animal carcasses in the Australian particular about its body indicates gender, apart from the outback, taken by Sidney Nolan and perpetuates the idea collection of what could be eggs that Bootflower appears to of Australia as a barren place, inhospitable to animals and be guarding. The translucency of the peach- coloured window humans alike. covering creates an ever-shifting backdrop for Bootflower, as it allows the light and shadow from outside the gallery in. The comforting qualities of this are contrasted with the harsh

looking stack of wooden pallets on which Bootflower sits, which evoke the inhumane transport of livestock.

Personal Framework

Using the background information provided, and your own Using the background information provided, and your own research, answer these questions: research, answer these questions:

1. Where and when did Tucker make this work? 1. How are Piccinini’s personal interests and beliefs How does it reflect his personal history and reflected in her work? beliefs? 2. What do you think the artist is trying to 2. What do you think the artist is trying to communicate? communicate? 3. How does the work make you feel, as the viewer? 3. How does the work make you feel, as the viewer? How does your personal history affect your views? How does your personal history affect your views?

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Cultural Framework

Using the background information provided, and your own Using the background information provided, and your own research, answer these questions: research, answer these questions:

1. How do you think Tucker’s experiences of WWII 1. How have contemporary issues such as genetic impacted his work? engineering impacted Piccinini’s work?

2. What about his location in Europe, away from 2. How has Piccinini drawn on mythology in her work? home in Australia? What symbolism has she used?

3. How did his socioeconomic status impact his art 3. How do you see gender depicted in the work? How practice? does this reflect contemporary sociocultural beliefs?

4. How did the work of fellow Australian artists, and 4. This art work has been exhibited before, alongside European trends in art influence Tucker’s Piccinini’s Meadow. How does its current placement practice? in Heide’s Tucker Gallery affect your interpretation?

5. This art work has been exhibited in many contexts. How does its current placement in Heide’s Tucker Gallery affect your interpretation?

Contemporary Framework

Using the background information provided, and your own Using the background information provided, and your own research, answer these questions: research, answer these questions:

1. How might the original context in which the 1. How does the choice or presentation of subject artwork was made change its meaning or purpose matter, or media, materials and techniques reflect for the contemporary viewer? contemporary arts practice?

2. How does the choice or presentation of subject 2. What new media or technologies has the artist used matter, or media, materials and techniques to produce the artwork? reflect artistic traditions? Was the work considered innovative at the time it was made? 3. How are Piccinini’s materials, techniques and processes similar or different to those used in 3. How has our relationship to the Australian sculpture in the past? Consider also the utilisation of landscape changed over time? artist apprentices in the past as opposed to industrial teams in the contemporary era. 4. How might the artwork be interpreted given the difference between Aboriginal and Western ideas of agriculture and the land? How does the current issue of climate change impact this?

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Your turn…

Use the Analytical Frameworks Discuss the following pairings of art works, made pre and post 1990:

Plate The Trees Have no Tongues (Flight) David Boyd and Hermia Boyd (1963) Hayley Millar-Baker (2019)

Cratered Head Belly Albert Tucker (1958-60) Patricia Piccinini (2011)

Full Moon Meeyn Meerreeng Asher Bilu (1959) Hayley Millar-Baker (2017)

Black Truce Belly James Gleeson (1986) Patricia Piccinini (2011)

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