Melancholy Landscape
Almost unintentionally, Imants Tillers has become a “poet-artist”. The twelve works in the exhibition Melancholy Landscape are at once poems and paintings. Tillers has always been attracted to art with a textual bent, and over the years has referenced such poet-artists as Colin McCahon, Joseph Beuys and Lawrence Weiner. In recent times however, the text itself has assumed an increasing significance, with place-names, phrases, and evocative words providing the structure, indeed the raison d'être, for Tillers’ art.
“A THROW OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE” (The View from K, 1997)
These luminous ultramarine words (which have bordered every painting since The View from K in 1997) provide a key to understanding Tillers’ increasing focus on text. The words come from Un Coup de Dés (1897), an influential poem in which Stéphane Mallarmé pioneered the idea of “concrete poetry”. In Mallarmé’s spacialised poem (and Tillers’ art) the typography, physical placement of the words, and the space that surrounds them, are as important as the words themselves. As Tillers recently commented: “the words and phrases that occur in my paintings have become the dominant element; the works are Mallarméan poems not on blank pages but on coloured, painted pages.”
“THE BOOK TO COME” (Nature Speaks: AP, 2007)
The idea of a painting being a single page in a book is one that Tillers has continually developed in his oeuvre. Tillers’ concept of “The Book of Power”, where his paintings can be considered collectively as one work, derives from Mallarmé’s idea that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book”. The pages of Mallarmé’s Le Livre were to be unbound and read in any order, providing an infinite number of starting points and possible combinations. Similarly, Tillers’ individual paintings are like unbound pages in an ever-expanding book. Each work contains excerpts of meaning – phrases, sentences, or short essays that remain self-contained even as they relate to the overall body of knowledge.
“WHEN WORDS LEAD NOWHERE” (Nature Speaks: AO, 2007)
In Un Coup de Dés punctuation is nonexistent, resulting in profound syntactical ambiguity. One can read the poem in any direction, annihilating the possibility of a clearly articulated statement. In much the same way, the words and phrases in Tillers’ paintings can be comprehended in any order. Every time our eyes traverse the shimmering canvasboards we find new combinations. Meaning is continually alluded to, but never securely grasped; the viewer/reader remains perpetually on the cusp of understanding. Yet instead of being dissatisfying, this allows for open-ended readings and poetic associations – the continual expansion (rather than compression) of meaning.
Much of the imagery in this exhibition evokes a kind of pre-language or half-formed alphabet. In Melancholy Landscape I and II flecks denoting burnt or stunted trees recall the primitive and incomprehensible utterances of some long forgotten language – an Urtext embedded in and brought forth by the landscape. Layered above this imagery are the truncated letters and obliterated words from Rosalie Gascoigne’s Monaro 1985. In Gascoigne’s work, weathered Schweppes crates are cut in such a way that their words are only partially visible. Gascoigne often referred to her works as ‘stammering concrete poetry’, as if the process of cutting up the letters added a kind of stutter to her creations. For Gascoigne, words were certainly ‘concrete’ material: things that could be wrenched free not only from syntax but from the syllabic order.
“THERE IT IS AGAIN” (Blossoming 16, 2008)
Layering and repetition have long been central tenants of Tillers’ practice. Images and fragments frequently reappear in Tillers’ oeuvre, re-worked and re-considered. From the late 1980s, Tillers’ paintings became more and more complex and multi-layered, with numerous images brought together in individual paintings. Tillers’ skill was in the intuitive placement of imagery, the strange and powerful juxtapositions that provided the basis for his compositions. Increasingly, Tillers’ compositions are framed around word placement and the interaction between image and text. Tillers has developed a vocabulary, a poetic lexicon from which he draws and to which he continually adds. The choice of words and phrases is affected by the dominant imagery, adjacent motifs, and by his current interests and reading material. The selection also comes about in a coincidental fashion – poignant words and headlines emerge from the discarded sheets of newspaper used to protect the artist’s desk from paint. Tillers keeps the paper stencils he creates for words in piles on the stacks of canvasboards in his studio, like pools of language from which he draws and recycles. In the re-use of words and phrases across different paintings, Tillers is able to create new possibilities for interpretation through shifts in tone, colour, placement and context.
“IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE AND SUFFERING” (Blossoming 15, 2007)
Many of the words floating across the landscape imagery in this group of paintings have a melancholic flavour. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the poet Marcus Clarke’s conception of the Australian landscape as a site of melancholia. In his poems and writings on Australian art in the late nineteenth-century, Clarke developed the idea that the antipodean landscape possessed a “weird melancholy”. The peculiarities of Australian flora and fauna that were unfamiliar or incomprehensible to European eyes contributed to an overall sense of strangeness, a kind of mournful sadness. Colonial authors often described the landscape as “gloomy” and “dismal”, expressing their discomfort particularly in the unsettled districts of land, such as the colonies’ vast eucalypt forests. Tillers perceives a similar melancholy in the contemporary landscapes of Rosalie Gascoigne and Fred Williams. Whether this melancholy is derived from the landscape itself or is a projection of the artist’s psychic state is an open question. One could certainly view the Australian landscape as a place of historical struggles, conflict and tragedy. Yet the quality of melancholia is not Australia-specific and can also be witnessed in the landscape paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Colin McCahon and Egon Schiele. In Blossoming 15 and 16 Tillers combines Schiele’s wintry European landscapes with Gascoigne's truncated letters and in the latter there is an evocative sense of weird melancholy as two moons appear to rise against a strangely high horizon-line.
In this group of works Tillers unites the poetics of landscape with the open-ended structure of concrete poetry and the melancholy of obliterated language, offering a unique synthesis of poem, page and painting.
Olivia Sophia
Tim Bonyhady, "The Melancholy Landscape",
Images in Opposition: Australia Landscape Painting
1801 - 1890, Melbourne Oxford University Press, 1985 p.124 |
