My inclination was always towards image and form, showing a passionate interest in drawing and the ‘artistic’ from an early age. This manifested itself as a fascination with all art forms, but most importantly as an innate physical and emotional reaction to form, beauty and image in the visual arts. Even as a child I instinctively looked for the underlying structure and harmony of the composition of the artwork. I always looked for the visual devices used by the artist to help ‘construct’ a successful work. I admired the surface qualities of any artwork, but always wanted to look for the hidden elements that underpinned this surface ‘reality’. Since then I have learned that to make a successful art work, in any medium, you must walk along the edge of the cliff of failure at some late stage in the making process in order to complete a successful creative work. At some point you must balance a work on the edge of both success and failure and steer it past ‘the rocks’ which claim many attempts at finished works. At some late point in the process you must risk all to gain all. This is never easy because each work has its own story and the edge of the cliff is never clearly defined until you stumble across it. Artists, if nothing else, must learn, like mountain climbers, to risk everything to gain the high ground.
THE HUMAN DILEMMA
Our human dilemma is that we must deal with the paradox that we are born with a defined and finite body that comes equipped with a mind that can glimpse the infinite. I suspect that the major role of formalised spiritual practices within human society has been to try and create concepts and a language to attempt to reconcile these disparate qualities that book-end the human condition. For example, our lives are played out within a time frame which is dwarfed by the grandeur and magnitude of the time frames needed to form galaxies, stars and planetary systems. How do we as human beings deal with the enormous gulf between our own innate physical reality and the magnitude of space, time, distance and scale? How do we as finite creatures deal with the enormity of the forces that have given us life and could so easily take it back again?
If we grasp the infinite with both hands we can deny the flesh and it will wither and die or be hated by us for it’s obvious shortcomings. If we grab the flesh with both hands we deny the infinite and we can become lost in a world of senseless gratification and pointless power struggles with all around us. One part of us believes we should be ‘master’ of everything, the other knows that our mastery of anything is temporary and vulnerable. All our great cities can be swept away by any number of natural disasters or by our own foolishness through overuse of precious natural resources. At first blush this may sound like a very bleak landscape, but on further inspection we can come to appreciate the elegance of the human solutions we as a species have developed to resolve these dilemmas. Both religion and the arts have always attempted to resolve the duality of our world by building bridges between the separated elements of the finite and the infinite. The scale of the mismatch has forced us to construct solutions that are full of capacity and resources to connect these disparate human realities. Our connection to God is our connection to the wonder, grandeur and majesty of a living, breathing universe. Our public ceremonies allowing us to gather in community to share our joys and sorrows and in doing so lessen the burden, gain insights and gather the strength needed to accept sorrows and look for joys. It is no accident that many of the most important human religious ceremonies or sacraments happen at pivotal times in our lives; leading us through the thresholds of births, deaths, marriages and rights of passage from one stage of life to the next. At these entry and exit points to our earthly existence stands the structural pillars of formalised religion in a landscape full of momentous events beyond our control and easy understanding. This is where we need our best human resources to aid our individual efforts in dealing with the journeys we undertake in our lives. The history of formal religions is the history of social institutions attracting and supporting the best human talents available to it as they try and help others deal with our spirituality, human dilemmas, challenges, frailties and great inner strengths.
In Australian Aboriginal tribal society most initiated adults would join in with the making and preparation of art-objects to be used in formal tribal ceremonies. As a largely nomadic society, people would arrive early at a sacred site to make preparations from local materials and resources. Body painting and adornment would form a large part of the preparations for any ceremony, the dances becoming a ‘living’ embodiment of Dream-time ancestors and creation spirits, which inform and underpin their culture and lives. In contemporary Western society there is a separation between professionals and skill based careers. Individuals dedicate whole lives to particular aspects of their communal culture. Artists too live lives that are dedicated to particular aspects of artistic endeavour and serve many groups within the whole community. They use their skills and creative insights to try to capture the ‘voice’ of a generation, to mark out the essence of a life lived within a particular time, a particular place and a particular community. The role of the artist is to become the ‘connector’ between the invisible world of the spirit and the visible world of the flesh. They must find a way to create stories and images which express both worlds fully. Many people are blessed with a rigorous intellect that understands and can identify the key issues to be resolved within a culture. Others are not as clear on the vision needed to create human culture, but excel at being able to take other people’s ideas and concepts and convert them into reality. The artist is unusual because in order to produce a body of high quality creative work, they must be equally at home with both concept and practice. This unusual pairing of both sides of human endeavour means that not only must they be good at identifying cultural issues and an artistic vision , but they must also be among the most skilful at converting ideas into reality. However, there is a third element in this process and that involves being able to come up with original and unique solutions, giving a distinctive flavour to advanced outcomes. The artist must find their ‘voice’. For much of the Catholic Churches history it was a key player in sponsoring great artists of their day. The church co-opted leading artists into the process of creating sacred spaces and carrying the churches message to a largely illiterate community in image, decorated sacred space and music. This relationship is well documented, especially during the European Renaissance period. Human history and cultures have left a trail of monuments, temples, walled cities full of sacred art depicting our devotion to deities and acknowledging the scope of our commitment to documenting our human spiritual stories and journeys.
At a tribal level the need to produce sacred objects and ceremonies would be shared between most initiated adults. This process of preparation for a ceremony would be almost as important as the event itself, especially in the case of a burial where it allowed both family members and the community to formally begin their grieving and channel their emotions into a healing process. As human society developed, organised agriculture developed the capacity to supply and store surplus crops. This production of abundance lead to the building of villages, towns and cities which became a complex network of trade, industry and commerce. City life and the creation of a complex communal culture lead to the construction of large temples throughout the ancient world. The Italian Renaissance saw Chapels, Churches and eventually Cathedrals built throughout Europe. Artists were in great demand to fill these palatial buildings with art which for many societies became the highest expression of their cultural achievements. The history of church art became the history of great art. The twentieth century saw the growing influence of protestant reform within the Christian churches and it’s call for modest worship spaces which emphasized the experience of the ceremony and the coming together in community of the church members and not the opulence of the interior spaces of the church building itself. This coincided with the decline of direct political power within the church, as formal religion withdrew from this sphere of direct social power and influence. In fact for many protestant sects there was no permanent centralised church building, instead people gathered within dedicated rooms within private homes. Leading up to and into the early twentieth century, artists distanced themselves from major cultural institutions and pursued the role of social radical calling for reform and individual expression as the ultimate creative act. The institution of the church and the emerging role of artist as social reformer and radical created a separation and a permanent gulf between these once great allies that few were able to bridge. After the Second World War the dislocation and re-location of many major European artists to the new worlds of Nth. America and beyond saw the power base of artists shift from the sacred to the secular. During the twentieth century few, if any, great art careers were lived out within the formal world of church life or culture. The growing influence of the abstract and the informal within the arts saw little common ground shared between church authorities looking for sacred images and leading artists of the second half of the twentieth century who were looking for personal expression. Isolated examples of fine works completed by leading artists as church commissions exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule. The flow of sacred art was not the torrent it had once been, the attraction of the formal sacred image for artists had lost it’s appeal and shifted towards the spiritual, the provocative, the ethereal or the tribal.
ART SCHOOL
My families’ ancestry, like many Australian families, is a mixture of European influences, in my case German, Scottish and Irish. While at art school I majored in sculpture (mainly works in wood and metal) and contemporary design. During my tertiary studies I discovered the sublime work of the Southern German (early) Renaissance Woodcarvers like Veit Stoss and Tilman Reimenschneider. Pursuing refined carving within the context of contemporary sculptures, allowed my art practice to combine both my interests in expressive sculpture, fine woodworking and contemporary design. To my surprise this new body of work, sculptures in wood and metal, has become for me at least, a bridge between my German ancestry and the ancestry of the ancient Australian landscape. Most of my early artworks involved figurative pieces in wood with other media such as bronze, steel and glass. The carving process allowing me to explore the two major interests at that time, historic German carving of the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods and Pacific rim tribal carving. The unconscious connection, I realized after, between both art areas, being their roles as creator of sacred objects within living cultures.
My time at art school was exciting and rewarding, but also confusing. The influences of the contemporary art world lacked authenticity and authority for me. So much of the posturing seemed like clever art school games to me, lacking credibility and failing to provide a vision of what art could or should be. So many artists were still trying to create social outcomes with their work; pursuing affect rather than the substantial matters which I felt were at the heart of every creative act. Whether this was true or not I was not in a position to prove or disprove. My only avenue for recourse was my own body of work. With the sacred and the figurative ‘off the menu’ at art school, pursuing my interests in sacred art from my German heritage or tribal art from the Pacific region, became, for me, the radical option. My overriding feeling at the time was that art was meant to deal with substantive matters within current society and in this role to inspire and lead others to substantive insights into their lives and culture. I am sure that every practicing artist or art student would make the same claim as I just have. But for me the reality of much of what was produced lack focus, vision and depth. To me there seemed to be a ‘throw away’ mentality to so many of the avenues of artistic expression that were pursued, explored and so quickly discarded as people moved on to the next big thing.
The art world that I was growing up in was fascinated with the new, the novel, the extreme and the provocative. I have never shrunk from using strong images in my work, but I did not care for new being pursued for it’s own exclusive ends, the ‘art for art’s sake’ seemed to me to devalue art because I saw art as possessing many layers which could speak to many audiences at once. To say that your art only spoke to an educated elite’ who were familiar with current trends within contemporary art practice, for me, devalued the capacity of art to reach out speak with many voices to a diverse range of views and tastes. So as an artist how does one react to this situation of neglect or lack of interest for your approach to art and find a quiet place to create within the whirling storm of current art world activity? Most of the major Australian sculptors of that time who wanted to pursue a pure art approach to their careers, worked as lecturers in prestigious Tertiary Education art schools, exhibited mainly abstract metal sculptures within the private gallery system, sold works to major public collections and occasionally had works commissioned. Those who wanted to pursue a craft based approach to sculpture normally worked in natural materials, worked full time at a subsistence level fulfilling commissions for private clients, the corporate sector and the churches. They were fiercely independent and self-reliant and probably had little or no contact with the top private galleries and were not included in prestigious public gallery collections. My instinct as a young sculptor was to approach this situation head on and exhibit within the art gallery system and chase down public art commissions. This had mixed success, but never had the potential to provide me with any sort of permanent income which would support both my young family and my art career. I taught at the secondary and tertiary level, which provided an income but no art career possibilities. I watched as art teachers around me lined up in never-ending queues applying each year for art grants to allow them to work full time on their art. It worked for very few who eventually became sponsored members of an elite’ club, fed on a diet of art school teaching, public grants and overseas trips to stay in touch with the latest trends from ‘some-where-else’. I tried once as a young artist for an arts council grant when it would really have made a difference to my emerging art practice, but along with all the others my application was ‘binned’ and I vowed to do it on my own (the Australia council would just have to learn to get on without me – besides, standing in queues has never held a great attraction for me).
Working as a sculptor (I entered art school/teachers college as a painter and came out as a sculptor, this says a lot about my painting) meant that working without support is far easier said than done. By its very nature art works in three dimensions are notoriously difficult to fund, source materials, find appropriate work spaces and hardest of all, find commissions or sell your work through a gallery. Public art commissions were few and far between, private art sales of sculptures were rare, architects were influenced by the modernist school which was looking for clean lines and simple uncluttered forms in their buildings, sculpture was not on the menu, other than large anonymous ‘designer’ forms in welded steel, large in scale but low in expressive art content and character. A circuit breaker was needed and in response to a dream where I glimpsed an image for an exhibition work of a female figure tied to a cross (at the time I was intrigued with the notion that the Christ figure could represent a point equidistant between male and female qualities), I began to understand that perhaps the church area offered untapped potential for providing support for the arts. As mentioned before, part of my ancestry is Germanic and during my studies I had discovered the sculptural work of late Gothic and Early Renaissance German cathedral art works. Tilman Reimenshneider and Veit Stoss were standout artists of their day and the logistics and sustained excellence of the large church commissions they created fascinated my young mind. It was as far away from the cold anonymous works in steel that I saw all around me (although to be fair I loved the almost organic but dynamic rusted steel forms of Sydney sculptor Ron Robertson-Swann). At that time this countries leading young sculptor, Anthony Prior (who sadly passed away far too young) was beginning to use timber as part of abstract multi-media works but mainly using the wood to express the sensual and the organic. I wanted to use the wood to create lasting studies in human emotion and drama, I wanted to express the feelings of the reverence that I felt when I worked with materials from the earth, and I wanted to have the works housed and treasured within public spaces so that they could be a part of people’s lives and of a living culture. Cut off from public gallery collections and private art sales, the Church became a potential client and way forward through what looked and felt like, at the time, a desert landscape. If I was commissioned by the church to do serious work, not merely decorations or repeats of existing standard images, then it had the potential to allow me to serve my sculpture apprenticeship, begin to make my way in the world, support my young family and fund my own exhibition art projects. Twenty years on, my wife Saadia and I have a family of four children who have all managed to live at home and study full time at university, a beautiful property in the Gembrook Forest 60 kilometres east of Melbourne and this year, (2006-7) five major church projects in four states including renovation of the Townsville Cathedral. Recently I have been able to complete a suite of private art works that have begun to give me access back into the private gallery area. Naturally the missing part of this equation is that as individuals Saadia and I have had to walk over ‘broken glass’ to build this private world. This involved working twice as hard as most others for half the pay and in this state of uncertainty wonder if the next round of bills would finish the dream and take everything away that had been worked for so far. Artists, above all else, want rich and interesting lives with just enough money to complete this task. (Please note the generous donation of the rural river property owned by Sydney Nolan and Arthur Boyd to the nation). They seek challenges, both private and public, which take them forward in their search for their artistic potential and cultural home. Against all the odds and against all the advice I received from friends in the contemporary art area, this pursuit of work within the church has paradoxically allowed me to approach my creativity on my terms, rather than having my creativity held to account by the next fashionable wave surging through contemporary culture and art schools. Like Australian indigenous artists, I realise now that l am fascinated my the notion of the sacred and permanent and not the transient and have, by default, undertaken a lifetime search for what this means when you come from a European heritage but look for the sacred within an Australian context and landscape.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the more I have thought about the position I now find myself in, the more it is beginning to look like I have taken the ‘radical’ option. The current art world, despite appearances to the contrary, has become the new conservative Academy. I now realise that the types of people who ran the traditional European Art Academies are probably the same that run it now; only they now wear black clothes and have radical contemporary hairstyles, or wear bowties and a suit. Their compulsion to play ‘traffic cop’ and control creativity has probably not changed, their need to be ‘at the helm’ of whatever is happening, has probably not changed. But what has changed is that in the past there was an agreed understanding of what mattered culturally and how it should be achieved. I understand that much of this was a re-formulated classicalism which was happy to stifle current trends for the sake of control and predictability, but at least there were culturally agreed methods and outcomes for artworks. This current uncertainty has, I believe, slowed the amount of quality achievement into the arts, rather than accelerated it as many believe. This uncertainty has breed an atmosphere where we no longer feel able to make judgements on the relative merits of art outcomes. This radical ‘devaluation of the currency’ of art and the creative has meant that what is culturally valuable has been attached, not to the substantial, but to things that are novel, individual, distinct and discrete. My interest in the sacred, public worship and communities gathering together to share a common vision and faith was a direct reaction against the art world’s push to accentuate the individual, the discrete and the role of creative individual as the gifted ‘outsider’ who operated beyond the comprehension and understanding of most members of the community. What point is there to creating an artwork if there is no-one to share it with. The idea of turning creative thoughts and concepts into a finished artwork present within current reality, is to share it. It is in sharing it with others that the human circle of creativity is completed and the full potential of an artwork is revealed, treasured and protected because what was owned by one is now owned by many.
WHY THE IMAGE OF THE CRUCIFIX?
While searching for themes within my own art practice and interests, my mind kept seeing the recurring image of a crucified corpus which represented both male and female qualities as a full expression of our shared humanity (this novel approach is not new, many other creative people have explored this theme). For me the Christ figure had the potential to represent our full humanity which must, by inference, be both male and female. One of the great revelations for me in the teacher/artist course I undertook, were the theory subjects like Sociology, Psychology and Philosophy. Here were subjects which lead you into a deeper understanding of the human condition. It was these subjects which fuelled my interest in the male-female duality and it’s place within human society and experience. As a response to this interest I began making expressionist Crucifix based art-works during my second year of art school that had the figure as androgenous or female, rather than the traditional male corpus. These works also represented for me the ambiguous role of the female within formal church structures. My impression was that although females were to be admired and acknowledged (with a traditional of strong devotion to the Madonna) they were not to be included on an equal basis within the power structures of the church. As a young art student my mind was intrigued by the dual capacity of social structures to both create and destroy culture; to sponsor the best that a community may have or to ignore or destroy the new and the vibrant. Whether this was accurate or not I was not in a position to know, but the idea became a spring-board for a range of new works and in the end artists always pursue the immediacy of substantive new ideas, many times finding out years after the works were completed whether they were valid or not. Strangely enough someone within the art school knew an Anglican priest who had a well known interest in contemporary art. He was invited to the sculpture studio at University to see what I had been working on and took an immediate interest in one of the works which he ended up purchasing for his current Melbourne parish. After finishing art school and finding little connection for my sculpture within the private or public art arena, my mind began to turn to the idea of professional devotional art for an emerging Australian church culture. I had to weigh this option up against the current ‘fashionable’ regime within the gallery system. For me the echoing beauty of the sacred within human cultures of all types, from tribal to great city states, was easy to acknowledge and personally compelling to pursue.
Many of our human dilemmas of the twentieth century have been brought about by our material success. Individuals could now generate enough wealth to be independent of the group. Within tribal society it was very difficult to physically survive outside the tribal group. The group generated enough food to allow all to live, and provided physical defence for all including the young, the unwell and the elderly. The material independence of the individual within contemporary society lead to a search for psychological independence from the group. Individuals began to wonder what creative potential individuals would have if they were freed from the ‘shackles’ of social control and social restrictions on their behaviour and performance. The notion within contemporary art schools was that the highest order of artistic endeavour did not rest with pursuing art goals with public outcomes, but rather individual art goals within a closed world of contemporary art theory and recent practice. As a three dimensional artist my personal need and interest to engage with large scale art projects was at odds with current art world theory and practice. Certainly large scale contemporary public art projects were undertaken, but they usually involved an intensely personal art vision which was intended to have little relevance to the lives and experiences of ordinary community members. It needs to be said here that there is a vast difference both in intention and outcome between art works which are ‘high-minded’ and intellectually demanding and those which are deliberately obtuse, evasive, insular and conceited. In practical terms, demanding that all members of a society should understand the private language of hand signals employed by a few stock traders on the floor of busy and noisy stock exchanges is unrealistic and unfair. But this is what the contemporary art world has done demanding that ordinary people fund and appreciate contemporary public art works which have little formal connection to a public art language, either past, present or future. The public is asked to be the recipients of art projects which have little or no regard for their personal realities or the shared humanity that has allowed the communities to exist which sponsored the art project. No wonder the dilemma between private visions and public outcomes is blurred and confused in recent art history. My personal dilemma has been that because of current attitudes within the art world, the more I have used my personal art talents to create sacred art and spaces and serve public ends, the more I have been disenfranchised from the public resources of the current public secular art world. By not ‘towing’ the party line of individual vision and exclusive individual outcomes, I have become all but invisible to an art world fixated on the current, the individual and the deliberately evasive and obtuse. My most vivid image of the contrast of this approach and that of aboriginal art came in a television program of showing indigenous art in a New York private gallery. The camera panned over the aboriginal work which pulsed with life, spiritual vision and the ‘voice’ of natural inventiveness and beauty. The camera then strayed onto a collection of current artists within the gallery. Each image screamed at the one next to it, each trying to outdo the other as these young art school graduates scrambled for attention and a launch of a lucrative New York art career. The contrast between these two worlds could not have been greater, my sadness and dismay at the outcome for current and future western art practice could not have been more intense or heart felt for me. The only positive to be drawn from this for me was that I felt vindicated in my decision to steer my own art career away from the ‘jagged rocks’ of the immediacy of an international focused art world waiting to dash the hopes of a thousand hopefuls, towards the light of the spiritual, the substantive and the ethics of a shared cultural vision which involved other human beings, even the most humble and ordinary, as they too journeyed towards the light. In asserting and affirming my own humanity and creativity, I refused to join in with the current cultural ‘game’ which meant I must deny or diminish the humanity of others to establish my exclusive rights to a public and profitable art career. Human nobility either exists or it doesn’t and if it does then it appears in everyone or no-one. You cannot, as an artist, begin your campaign to acknowledge your own nobility by denying it in others. If it exists at all it exists in everyone and it is our task as a creative person to use our gift to draw the nobility out in others and encourage it in their lives wherever and however they are lived. For me the ‘sacred’ object and the sacred space became the my medium to express and attempt to capture the ‘light within’ all human journeys.