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Once Was a Field - review by Adam Geczy

Events in the Suburbs

We are accustomed to associate an event with a certain melodramatic quality. If a man is run over, that is an event comprised within certain spatio-temporal limits. We are not accustomed to consider the endurance of the Great Pyramid throughout any definite day as an event. But the natural fact which is the Great Pyramid throughout the day, meaning thereby all nature within it, is an event of the same character as the man’s accident, meaning thereby all nature with spatio-temporal limitations…
—Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature

High Modernism was called thus because it aspired to an exquisite autonomy, floating free of time, space, and any commonday reference. Non-objective painting was the quintessence of art’s transcendence of meaning. It communicated through form alone. Artists such as Mondrian, Albers and the early Malevich brought painting to a certain limit of the inarticulable, a heroic point that would soon lead to an impasse. Mondrian, as we know, had an aesthetic aversion to green because it symbolized nature, all that his painting was meant to go beyond. Meanwhile Malevich’s squares and crosses were meant as distillations of the forces of the universe. Albers’ paintings were enclosures that invented their own spatial dynamic through the internal relay of colour. The world is disavowed. What happens when such works are thrust into the landscape they eschewed?
Chrissie Ianssen’s current painterly interventions into suburban landscapes are part of a larger ongoing project into the limits of abstraction. By virtue of the fact that there is no representation, non-objective abstraction is already a limit. But when rearticulated back into ‘nature’, it can assume a different set of values. Nature is used advisably here since it is we who give it form; it is made ‘eventful’ once we give things names, make pictures. It is a figment of our imagination as that which exists beyond the imagination. Non-objective abstraction, like that of Albers, is of course entirely dependent on nature since it defines itself as everything that nature is not. Its transcendence of nature is therefore more rhetorical than actual.
In these works Ianssen has created wistfully jarring contrasts in which a large Albers-like surface is brought into the environment, used as a raft for a body, or semi-neglected in the corner of a dirty canal. These are far from empty gestures. They speak to the very demographic of Western Sydney, and the way that culture, an idea and a commodity, is distributed. That this demographic does not have the same access to galleries, theatres and concert halls has long been a sensitive issue, and one that peppers all the political jockeying in this region. But the same questions always arise: what is the extent to which culture can be imported to help it to be nurtured? And so to what extent do the local population feel patronized and told to emulate other people? And to what extent do these measures create a problem were there is none? Have these communities had enough of cultural imports?
Ianssen’s objects are surreptitious outsiders; surrogates for herself, the city artist now in the West. The works are cannily multivalent. On one hand they symbolize the injection of foreign elements into the landscape (here meant both figuratively and literally); on the other, they are incongruities that have been ignored and left to rot, suggestive of a failed project. Alas, without an elevated enough audience to appreciate it, without an infrastructure to create such awareness, high art becomes not very much at all, just colours and shapes. One part of this suite is photographs of architectural details bereft of artworks, which we search for and find similar abstract relationships. This was a popular ploy of Modernist photographers, but Ianssen has a different intention. It is a poetics of place in a place which may or may not be indifferent to poetics. Or it asserts a level of meaning that is always there, and which, indeed, makes the artist superfluous. Has the artist’s intervention been in vain?
The final components to this series are meticulously shaped objects finished with bold geometric patterns. These are silhouettes of non-native flora that was typically used as ornamental features in suburban gardens. When situated in the landscapes they are foreign interlopers of a different kind, now heavily inflected by the debates surrounding environmental sustainability. They hearken to a day when nature was seen as masterable, less threatening, less uncertain. They are now made strangely grotesque, their incongruousness writ large, curious trophies of a bygone era. They are faint symbols of colonization when it is atomized to the domestic; they are folksy, ornamental items of nature turned into accessories to the suburban home.
Contemporary reflections on multi-culturalism, the republic, indigenous rights, bring home the extent to which Australia is very much a chaotic mish-mash of ideas. Built into its identity is fragmentation. It is a meeting place of all kinds of imports, influences and suppositions. The fragility of place is brought home to us all the more by the recent natural disasters in New Zealand and Japan. When I see Ianssen’s Albers-panel, I think of how preposterous the High Modernist project was. I am also reminded of how the Russian Constructivists wanted to make an art for the proletariat who only liked realist painting and radio. This does not however, make their gestures any less beautiful. Unlike their quest for monolithic universals, Ianssen’s works speak of a more furtive aesthetic that brings the incidental back to the once monumental, prodding it the point of dissolution.

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