THE UNCONFORMITY PROJECT A FOUR PART EXHIBITION BY TIM CHATWIN, JULIAN COOPER, RUTH JOHNSTONE AND JAN SENBERGS QUEENSTOWN HERITAGE AND ARTS FESTIVAL 12-14 OCTOBER 2012 THE HAULAGE UNCONFORMITY ■ The concept of unconformable geological relationships, learned in a first year course, is based on one of the founding principles of geology – that of uniformitarism. James Hutton (1726-97) was a pioneer in the field of geomorphology and geology and deduced from geological and landform relationships, that the present was key to the past and the earth was a lot older than previously thought. ■ ‘No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’ ■ Under the gaze of Mt Lyell, named for Charles Lyell who further championed Huttons ideas in the seminal publication ‘the Principals of Geology’, is one of the most spectacular examples of an angular unconformity I have seen in my time as a geologist. Exposed in the wall of the Gaspersic Quarry, are two juxtaposed sedimentary rock units that have an angular relationship to each other. You can see the red/purple sandstone to conglomerate beds of the upper Owen Formation tilted at an angle of 75 degrees; overlying at an angle of approximately 40 degrees are the light yellow to grey, sediments of the marine Pioneer Formation. The nature of this junction represents a time gap, a period of erosion or no deposition separating two rock masses of different ages. My hands upon seeing this outcrop for the first time, starting moving in line with the angles and my brain tried to decipher what came first and the cycle of deformation. The Owen beds were in the process of being tilted and uplifted due to orogenic activity when the Pioneer beds were deposited. As the overlying beds are not horizontal the sequence has been further tilted by orogenic activity since deposition. ■ CAROLYN TIMMS JAN SENBERGS – The crib room, 1983 acrylic on canvas, 152 x 183cm TIM CHATWIN – Light my way, 2012 acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61cm MINING THE ARCHIVE – RUTH JOHNSTONE Sticht’s print collection was accompanied by a THE SAVAGE ROCKS OF CIRCUMSTANCE – SHOW YOUR WOUNDS – JAN SENBERGS There are other more precise differences NOTES ‘Everything is so jumbled up in this overstocked carefully annotated inventory. His print ledger is TIM CHATWIN The exhibition of Jan Senbergs paintings in the emerging in the art world, in particular, during the 01 See Heather Lowe’s ‘The Carl Robert Sticht Collection: a Forgotten Legacy’, Art Bulletin of house (I mean only my own “treasures”!) that now housed in the State Library of Victoria and most I am underground at the Beaconsfield gold mine. historic Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company 1970s and early 80s. Artists began to reject the Victoria, NGV, No. 38, 1997 for a detailed things are not easy to get at, and if you so much of his prints are in the collection of the National It is July 2012, and we are 1160 metres below the offices in Queenstown is a return of sorts. ‘cosmopolitan modernism’ of the art coming out account of Sticht’s collecting as touch any one thing a pile of others may Gallery of Victoria. Woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer surface. It is hot and the humidity high. Metal plates Jan visited Queenstown several times during 1982 of New York. Simon Schama in his wonderful book history. 02 Patrick McCaughey, Voyage and Landfall, The Art tumble about your head.’– Robert Sticht describing were among his favoured works, and 50 Dürer and subsequently developed a suite of paintings Landscape and Memory7 is discussing the Germans and twisted sheets of steel support-mesh arc of Jan Senbergs, Meigunyah Press, 2006. Penghana in a letter to Mr Robertson, November prints were given priority listing in the ledger of overhead like a constellation, a second skin over that are important to the story of Australian Art. Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer when he says that 03 Ibid. p96. 19111 well over a thousand 16th to early 20th century the rock faces, keeping it all together. I am Under the auspices of LARQ and in the context of Pop Art was the obvious child of American urban 04 Emily Bullock, ‘Around the Bend – The curious power of the hills around The high-hipped profile of Penghana, designed in European works along with a smattering of accompanying Peter Hills, the Geotechnical Services Queenstown’s second Arts and Heritage Festival history and culture, but along with other versions Queenstown’, The Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 1897 as the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company Australian prints. Prioritising Dürer’s prints Manager, as he removes seismic monitoring systems the paintings will be seen for the first time in the of the avant-garde, like colour field painting, it was 18, No. 1, 2012. manager’s residence, appears to match the confounds Sticht’s alphabetically organised listing from various locations within the complex. We place which inspired their making. It’s also fitting seen by Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer as 05 Ibid. p92. surrounding hills of Queenstown. As an engineer in his index. Authentic Dürer prints are identified made our way down here via the spiralling decline, that they will be in situ during the commemoration uprooted from narratives of time and place.8 06 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin, 1962. and later a mine manager for the Mt Lyell company, as such and with accurate connoisseurship, which unites everything and everyone in a of the Mt Lyell mining disaster. Jan’s Mt Lyell series, which he collectively titled 07 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Harper Robert Sticht applied his propensity for moving facsimiles are also noted. While Sticht ascribes the relationship between the steeply dipping ore body Jan Senbergs paintings express something of the Copperopolis, is testimony to an artist painting Collins 1995. mountains to build a comfortable, if overfilled Small Passion as a facsimile, he has also collected and the surface. To travel the decline is to coil struggle and consequences of over 100 years of expressively and with a feeling for concepts of 08 Ibid. p124. 09 Geoffrey Blainey, The Peaks of Lyell, Melbourne home for his family atop a pyramid shaped hill, the at least one authentic print with the same title. down through Ordovician (488.3 to 443.7 million mining in the Queenstown Valley. Patrick McCaughey, time and place. There are interesting parallels University Press, 1954. plateau scraped to the smoothness of a billiard The facsimiles would have been highly useful for years ago) and Devonian (416.0 to 359.2 million in his 2006 monograph on Jan’s work, Voyage and with Geoffrey Blainey’s book The Peaks of Lyell9 10 Alain Borer, ‘A Lament for Joseph Beuys’, The table. It was a home for connoisseurship and comparative study, particularly with his set of the years ago) terrain and time, through configurations Landfall – The Art of Jan Senbergs2 titled the which is a dramatic story of mining in Queenstown. Essential Joseph Beuys, London (1996), p25. Cited on collectivemartelart.wordpress.com/.../ intellectual pursuits, supported by a vast collection. Large Passion and for more fully comprehending of rock shaped by immense force, cataclysm, chapter dealing with the Queenstown paintings The artist and the writer have creatively orchest- show-your-wound-joseph-beuys-and- the-ger- Being an artist is to be the keeper of a lifelong the religious narrative cycle. upheaval and more recently, human intervention. ‘The Infernal Regions of Tasmania’. This is an rated a flow of iconic and essential imagery linking, man- practice so there’s a guilty pleasure in indulging in Sticht’s art books were among his detailed The spectacle of the mine interior in our headlights, apocalyptic title which has its antecedents in 19th in a type of struggle, the environment and the traumalisvanhaeren/ 11 Angus Carlyle, Becoming Second Nature: Dan another’s collection without the burden of having accession lists, coded and ordered in 100 (book) the weight of earth hanging above, the scale of century nomenclature detailing Tasmania’s dark forces of man. Holdsworth and the Sublime, to store and care for it. Sticht’s legacy provides cases. His art book collection, particularly those industry and mechanisation and time, is both alien story but towards the end of McCaughey’s article ‘Find a way or make it’ – Aut inveniam viam aut http://www.danholdsworth.com/ the background material for my fleeting and piled focussed on prints, matches any reference section and compelling. The body is affected; weighed he is at pains to suggest that Jan’s Queenstown faciam –became a catch cry for living and working information/text/ up intervention in his former office. in public institutions of his time. Sticht had no less down itself with safety equipment, rock dust going pictures are not protest pictures. Rather, in his in the mountainous terrain of the West. The first 12 John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1999. Understanding how mining and art are than two libraries in his house (with bookcases into the lungs. terms they seem to come closer to that romantic white explorers burnt the country ahead of them 13 Richard Fortey, The Earth; an Intimate History, interdependent is a broad and perhaps unexpected spilling out in other spaces) and they contained Resurfacing into the winter light I am disoriented notion of wonder and terror – 19th century to make their way into its labyrinth of rivers, gorges Harper Collins Publishers, London 2004. enquiry. At Penghana engineering comes to the his folios of prints, boxed in gold embossed and go through a physical shock of readjusting paintings of volcanoes, tempests and catastrophe.