10.2 John Young: Notes, Chronology, Bibliography

1 The Asian Modern, Volume II © John Clark, 2016 10.2 John Young: Notes, Chronology, Bibliography Artistic and art theoretical sources [The intellectual currents at play in Sydney and in Young’s early work in the 1980s have been ably summarized in Graham Forsyth, ‘The enchantment of theory’ in Coulter-Smith, 1993, 48-66] [in 1981-82] I was concerned with colliding the world of chance, which is natural, with the social determinations of the camera. I allowed and conjured his process by using a pocket Olympus camera set on a timer to automatically take photographs without my intervention – I merely carried it whereever I went, capturing images without ever looking through the viewfinder. I did not conceptualize or interfere with them. For me, the fascination lay in the outcome, whatever it may be, or the wonder that it encapsulated.… The act of taking these photographs was pointedly aimless: they were ‘mistakes’ or ‘revelations’ as it were. The action was something extremely abstracted, one had to let it go, but it was highly intuitive.In retrospect, I feel that this way of working was as far removed as possible from the prevailing lingusitic conceptualism of the seventies. Explanation and clarity played absolutely no role in these works. The photographic images revealed themselves only when no expectations were placed on the experience…. My arrival in Dublin on 2 April 1982 coincided with the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi [June 24, 1182 – October 3 1226]. To my surprise I also discovered that the First DayCover, issued that day at the Dublin Post Office was the image of the stigmatization of St. Francis painted by Sassetta. The pilgrimage offered a sense of grace, of rich, synchronic interventions. It also suggested to me that the resolution of incommensurate viewpoints could only be dissolved by a simple ‘mapping’ of their nature, an abutment of the very diverse concerns such as the ethical and conceptual extremes of Wittgensteing, Duchamp and Malevitch. Hence the bringing together of these concerns in one site for my first exhibition The Second Mirage [at Rosroe, Connemara, Ireland, in the cottage where Wittgenstein completed his Philosophical Investigations] in which I also gave up and laid bare all the conceptual conflicts of these concerns…. The exhibition comprises a single random photograph that I had taken on my travels – a remarkable chance photograph of a reflection of a Malevitch ‘cross’ painting in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. [Young in Barnes, 2005, 21]. In his ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ Wittgenstein explores a paradox within scientific writing, namely the coexistience of apparently rigorous rationalism with a more imaginative, metaphorical aesthetic dimension. Young notes that in his ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ Wittgenstein repeatedly emphasized the role of ‘charm’ and ‘persuasion’ in scientific writing. Young’s reading of Wittgenstein helped him question the myth of ‘scientism’ or mechanistic rationalism inWestern culture. [Coulter-Smith. 1993, 20] Feyerabend examines the degree to which the so-called ‘irrational’ informs scientific thinking. Feyerabend’s fundamental notion is ‘epistemological anarchism; and in his copy of Against Method Young marked off the following formulation of this notion: The epistemological anarchist has no compunction to defend the most trite, or the most outrageous statement. While the political or religious anarchist wants to remove a certain form of life, the epistemological anarchist may want to defend it, for he has no everlasting 2 The Asian Modern, Volume II © John Clark, 2016 loyalty to, and no everlasting aversion against, any institution or ideology. (Feyerband 1975, 189) [Coulter-Smith, 1993, 20] Theoretical explorations, 1981 Young & Blake, ‘On some alternatives to the code in the age of Hyperreality; the hermit and the city-dweller’, Art&Text, #2, Winter 1981. [This text is among the first theoretical expositions in Australia, by an artist working with a philospher, of semiotic theories, particularly those of Baudrillard and Sontag]. Heidegger clearing a path throughthe Black Forest and Wittgenstein prowling back and forth throughthe streets of Lonodn both explore such a “change in the nature of truth’ and warn of the pitfalls for those who do not know their way about […] The predominant reflex of those art theorists who do not simply ignore the new condition I one of failure of nerve. Not competent to discuss the philosophical issues(still lessto respond them) they take cover in the stance of a librarian who simply catalogues the different positions without taking sides. Baudrillard [in 1977] describes this truth-crisis as a collapse of those bodies of concepts that seemed to provide universal standards for legitimising our practices (in art, science, politics). 4 [...] there is no more correspondence between word and object. Only the abstract, discontinuous manipulation of the code and its reproduction exists. We consume not an object but an element in a code. And the code is not ideology since after all, the code is hiding nothing…5 In the domain of art criticism we see in pure form the “game with the code” that is, the attempt to treat the code its;ef as an object of fascination. Marxists and Foucaultians (usually apostate Marxists) become so captivated by their new theories that bthey begin to establish that very “supermarket of ideas” they denounce. 7 Yet if art as epistemological positions is seen as avant-garde, as cubism was once seen, Beauborg [the Baudrillard position of doubt] by its implosion presents such attempts at a definitive epistemological chauvinism (as that of cubism) to establish itself as a subversive analytic code, as a violent act of explosion. It must exist along, circulating indifferently – a particle in brownian motion. This sort of rhetoric can be found in Feyerabend’s principle of ‘anything goes’ which does not mean – as it more than often mistaken to mean – no method, therefore nothing goes (the manic) but rather, any rules, any method, any tradition and any form of life – the cancellation of any non-arbitrary criterion for the cognitive ranking of different knowledge traditions… 8. This Dandyism is the sort that artists, ‘discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that’ – although once a strategy for improving audience;’s experience for the conceptual, it has now turned into an institutional strategy, subjectivist, a simulacrum, of the humanist element in the Code. 9 [following Sontag’s Styles of Radical will, 1966] We need to understand semiotics by comparing it to a type of thought (“Pluralism”) that starts from the same discoveries and a similar rhetoric but does not lead to the same dead-ends: genealogical empiricism. 11 ..Sontag’s conception seems to see the silence as a spiritual enterprise, an act of transcendence. And the silence may even become an image of the transcendental act. This image of the transcendental act is the movement via negation, as seen previously, it is the dandyistic view that 3 The Asian Modern, Volume II © John Clark, 2016 the death of the Code, of meaning, of art and culture results in no codes, thus the positive identity, ‘artist’ must be placed in the empty space of transcendence. 14 The following works by Jan Dibbets are given as indicative for this text’s arguments, 15: 1971 The Dutch Mountain Series 1972 Land Sea Horizon 0o-1350 1973 The Comet Series [Below, citing the work of Gerard Titus-Carmel, a French artist shown at Documenta VI, 1977; Biennale of Sidney, 1979; Venice Biennale, 1972 and 1984] The hermit responds to the death of the code with a gesture of mourning and isolation. Carefully he goes over images of death and decay rendering them with a perfectionist delight in craftsmanship. But the work of cultural mourning, this progressive detachment of the hermit from all the cultural contents is accompanied by the discovery of the craft itself as value. By an impersonal immersion in the craft, the hermit comes to mourn the myth of his own subjectivity, the death of the artist. 17 Edited interview between John Young and Sean Lowry at Sherman Galleries, Sydney, on the afternoon of October 24, 2002. Sean Lowry (SL): In noting a distinction between much textbook Postmodern appropriation of art of the 19080s, in which the construction of ironic or critical distance generally relied heavily upon the specificity of the quotation, and your own appropriation related work of the same period, the specificity of the quotation itself appeared to be less important in your work from the outset. Despite the fact that much of the critical rhetoric that models of Postmodern appropriation, your application of the act of appropriation appeared to operate more as a told or production device rather than as a critical device from a relatively early stage. John Young (JY): Right from the start I was actually interested in the syntax because right through from Formalism to Minimalism in painting it’s always been about an interest in the actual construction of the work rather than any message the work carries, and in that sense I think I’ve departed from a paradigm of appropriation which was initially attributed to Imants Tillers [b.1950 in Sydney, Latvian Australian painter] and more specifically, Juan Davila [b.1946 in Santiago, Chilean- Australian painter]. In a sense, I just can’t bring myself to mouth emotions that actually belong to somewhere (one) else. I find that I now need to photograph things to protect and affect my own moods and emotions rather than borrowing. Although I know that whatever I take is always still a cliché informed by a lineage of other schematic images, I still sometimes need to flip back into my so-called own empirical environment. SL: By contrasting the historical, utopian Modernist model of autonomous expression with the hardened anti-historical cynicism of 1980s, Post modernism, in a sense where we now appear to exist in a time in which an agnostic approach is possible, consists of a general amalgamation of such dialectical propositions.

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