In memory of Elisabeth Unsworth
This first part of the essay aims to provide some preliminary comments about the iconographies of the recent ‘late’ suite of watercolours produced by Ken Unsworth in 2007-08. Part Two will seek to offer critical analyses of a wider range of the late suite of watercolours. Unsworth (b.1931) is one of Australia’s senior sculptors and installation artists and is widely known both nationally and internationally. His works are usually large, almost monumental, and one might observe produced on a grand scale. By contrast, from late 2007 until October 2008, he painted a suite of small watercolours on no larger than A3 sheets. The subjects of, and the restriction to, works on this small scale are related to the then social and domestic situations wherein he was the principal, and often sole, carer for his ill wife Elisabeth, who died in October 2008. Around this time Unsworth ceased to paint watercolours (and for the foreseeable future will not return), and turned again to planning and executing large installation works. For that period 2007-08 Unsworth’s work focussed largely on Elisabeth, her progress through illness to death, and their – note I stress their - emotional and artistic reactions and analyses of these circumstances. The major critical focus of these works is on the nexus of artistic and philosophical relationships between art and death. It is worth observing that there is often a critical hesitancy to recognise work of a seemingly auto-biographical focus such as these works apparently reference – the feeling at times is that the personal element intrudes to such an extent that the art is simply too viscerally pointed, too emotionally singular to be - let us be frank - good or even great art.
A fully extended argument on this issue is out of place here, but let me observe that much great art seems quite personally focussed: say the great poetry of the Elizabethan sonnets of Sidney, Spenser and even Shakespeare; later long poems from Wordsworth, Tennyson, even John Berryman and numerous poems by Peter Porter or Les Murray on the deaths of their lovers and parents; or the paintings of Rembrandt and Picasso that portray their various lovers and/or themselves; Dali’s obsessions with Gala, or even Frida Kahlo’s self portraits that spring to mind quickly. More thought would no doubt produce a longer list. The point is that all of these artists to varying degrees have made their subject matter from their lives or the lives of their lovers and families. And in many instances the attempt of the artists to memorialise their departed presents the fall back where the fear of mortality is both addressed directly through art – ars long vita brevis – and then troped to make that art a forward projection of an intimation of immortality. Since the Romantics in particular, (does this comma fix this up or did I not understand what the author was trying to say?) what artists produced was seen as an imitation - a representation - of their inner life – to share their genius of grasping the special nature of life and death that they can more capably or intelligently convey to the general audience. This allows us to be more – more alive - more intensely sensitive to the human. Yes, the intensely personal has of necessity to be made available to us all - the personal has to be transcended as it were - their moments of intense perception are conveyed to us. True, we can see them as simply reflections of their biographies – yet this would be and is a limitation. The preliminary study of the watercolour suite that follows does not seek to make connections to any further biographical details. This will be the task of later critics of a more Positivist view. In this light, Unsworth’s suite of watercolours provides such a deeply emotional and intelligent perception of ’their’ circumstances, and does it in such a way that we too are enlightened. Indeed these works demonstrate how great art can accommodate us to the idea of death, and in particular to an idea of death un-attached, rather than detached, from anything like intimations of immortality. The abiding strength of these works is their willingness to address the finality, dignity and courage of human mortality in promise of extension only through art.
Unsworth ranks among the most important of Australia’s artists and arguably the best of his generation (at least he is now on a level with Klippel and Parr). He is always cited as important in any survey of Australian sculpture and has received numerous awards, Venice and Sydney Biennale invitations, and has shown widely in Europe and Japan. In 2002 he was the focus of a Retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW. As large as the exhibition was it touched on only a fraction of his work. By its nature his installation work has often been transient, and as he also practised in the art traditions of Povera, Fluxus, and the Happenings styles of the sixties, even more likely to be fragmented and temporary, often performed and almost evanescent. In its way this transitional and floating aspect is an indexical marker for Unsworth’s oeuvre. This is a habitus that I want to call ‘suspension’ – what we might see as a metaphor that runs throughout the Unsworth canon. It isn’t the only possible term to apply to his work, but it is I would argue central to Unsworth’s practice. In the case of the watercolour suite the metaphor extends to ‘suspensions of belief’ to make play on the usual idea of alienation applied to the theatre – the suspension of disbelief.
For example, ‘classic’ Unsworth installations from the 1970s show large scale geometric forms made by suspending 100s of 2-3 kg smoothed river boulders. The most famous is the 10 metre ‘circle’ in the Art Gallery of NSW where some 100 boulders form a circular ‘plate’ suspended about 1 metre off the gallery floor with the suspending string-lines coming from one central point in the ceiling, and so ‘hung’ that the top and bottom containing surface planes of the plate give the illusion of being nearly perfectly flat. Variations on this suspension of boulders include larger and smaller circles, plates, semi circles, helical ‘explosions’ of similar kinds and other broadening figures where boulders are replaced with wooden forms, steel shapes and ‘artificially’ made stones. Even earlier than this Unsworth had tried ‘earth’ scape installations where geometric shapes were ‘dug’ into lawn spaces: holes, swathes of earth as if ploughed up and the like anticipated and paralleled other ‘earth’ artists such as Goldsworthy. In the same period his early performance pieces found Unsworth’s own body as the central image: a series of black-out scenes had him hanging from walls, or braced against walls, or with large wooden beams pinning him to walls.
In 1990-92 Unsworth worked with Architects Tonkin Zuleihka and Harford to design and build the Australian Vietnam Memorial in Anzac Parade, Canberra, which was dedicated in 1992. In this memorial Unsworth continued to deploy suspension as metaphor and in particular suspended boulders. In the original design, some 500 boulders – representing the dead soldiers - were to be suspended 10 metres from the ground forming a fragmented annulus suspended equally from the three supporting walls. In the final design and subject to the awarding committee’s recommendations the stones were replaced by a solid granite ring suspended from the three walls. The stones were held to be too reminiscent of a ‘ground burst’ that would have been terrifying to veterans, however the annulus was an elegant compromise and still conveyed the sense of ascending transient movement - the suspension of the dead en route to ‘public memorial’ immortality if not quite some kind of afterlife.
Suspension in these early works was largely a matter of contrapuntal effect. The sheer materiality of the boulders, the body, the objects floating as if working effortlessly against gravity, were matched by the sheer beauty of the formal aspects of circle, plate, helix or indeed distended body. But here too was a hint of the nature of bravura performance by an artist defying nature at the same time as working with its very dense materiel forms. Unsworth began early to develop the metaphor of art as a necessary transformation and as alchemy – indeed the alchemist became one of his key role-playing alter egos. Figuring in many of his mature works were angelic winged creatures, sometimes with the identifiable facial features of Unsworth as the ‘actor’/artist. Not unnaturally the winged artist is often transmogrified into numerous angelic personae often as annunciators – where Gabriel is chief but not sole named exemplar, nor is the ‘word’ to be announced always the advent of Christ. Annunciations are of course another iconic interest of Unsworth, often in the 1990s installations in which floating angelic forms hover at once delicately and menacingly over symbolic vessels, sometimes women, sometimes pianos, sometimes water-tanks. Variously these works demonstrate a complex relationship between Unsworth’s Australian-ness and his mental landscapes and the European culture he worked within and against. A little biography needs must intrude here. Elisabeth was European born and fled to Australia during WW2. A trained classical pianist she brought a new vitality to their mutual awareness of the European heritages. The most famous example of Unsworth’s reaction to those connections, as I see it, is his ‘Portrait of Elisabeth’ (Art Gallery of NSW) which comprises a half sized grand piano with Elisabeth’s name on the maker’s name board, and having six keyboards acting as steps. The lid is open and the sound box is filled with straw, burned music sheets and mice. While not strictly suspended the piano in this state shows the necessary ascension Unsworth outlines in order to approach – yes Elisabeth herself – an extraordinary image of emotional depth – or moreover what she becomes metaphorically – European art dampened (musically and artistically) by the straw man – Unsworth as colonial artist himself. Biography explicates a more complex meaning beyond itself here. Ironic self deprecation – applying the idea of suspension – the pianistic stairway is the task of the ascending artist to attain a perfection only a little etiolated by his own antipodean straw. Other works show pianos similarly constrained by iconic Australian forms – dismembered pianos randomly struck by whips and sticks, water tanks leaking sludge onto keyboards, angels hovering above keyboards as if Gabriel were annunciating the becoming of - not Christ so much - as the very idea of a local Australian, specifically ‘unsworthian’, art.
These works and numerous other public installations are well known examples in which Unsworth uses the suspension of objects, or a body, as metaphor for the movement from one condition to another. ‘Suspension’ seems a metaphor for conveying the idea of transience, but more than that of transformation arrested, of something becoming something else, or being in-between states. In the recent watercolours there are many examples of these kinds of ‘suspended’ images. Many of these images can be traced iconographically as above, as far back as the early performance works, and the biennales and Retrospective installations from 1980-2000.
In what now amounts to about 300 watercolours Unsworth covers the full subject range of his fifty years, but large numbers of the paintings are strongly focussed on the transitional state of someone dying and of someone else being with them, helping, aiding, longing for it not to be so, adjusting both to the idea of one person not being.
Many of the images show a mystically shrouded figure standing on, or floating above a beach looking across a body of water to the ‘other’ world, or in other instances figures hover above deserted landscapes. The allusion to a soul in Limbo is not difficult to make, however the iconography here adds considerable meaning. Looking north across a body of water recalls numerous images from the High German romanticist and symbolist paintings of the 18-19thCs, while Unsworth’s intrusions of such deserted ‘Australian’ landscapes recall but don’t borrow from Boyd, Williams, Nolan or even Olsen. This pairing of high European art symbolism and techniques and localised Australian tropes is typically Unsworth. And while the watercolours make insistent and constant referral to earlier work, particularly to installations, there is something new in many of them. The floating beach figures are one such ‘image-cluster’, but there is an abundance of other suspended objects, figures, and shapes. And watercolour itself is of course a suspension of body colour in liquid wash. All of these points add a new ‘aesthetic’ edge: a new layer of that becomingness/transience. In these paintings suspension seems to express a tonality of immense loss, and contrarily joy, of ecstatic release and paradoxic restraint and it’s a totally arresting constraint – a decision held in a moment of vital suspense. Unsworth grasps at lives of art shared, now in process of mutual leaving. The result isn’t a straightforward and old hat deployment of the ars longa vita brevis trope, or that the images intimate immortality. If anything their point of arrest is rather like Keats’ Grecian Urn in which art, while beautiful to the point of being sublime, suspends the very processes of both life and dying. There is neither immortality nor mortality in the watercolours, just transience as a continuing movement and just transformation of states captured, arrested, suspended. The question posed is whether art then offers the consolation of its practice for the tragic arc that the art itself traces? The answer here is that the question is likewise suspended along with the answer since that tracing is not completed. It is as if the tracing, drawing, or painting hand is continuous in its execution of the art – each work may be said to be finished, but in practice the art of these watercolours - the suite itself – is never complete – the hand is merely withdrawn for the moment, also hovering as the angelic annunciating ‘unsworths’ do, as entelechies not yet in a state of being, but in transience of becoming. So, where there is in many paintings the annunciating angel’s utterance of the word or the offering of ‘art’ there is the announcement - the saying of the word ‘death’, and the pronouncement is at once almost withdrawn, withheld, delayed. True, there are a finished number of self-contained paintings but these act as if they are a mere evanescent sample - a suspension too – of the idea of a ‘love affair of, and within, the practice of art’ in a dying but not yet terminated arc. Tragic and demanding of more than its biographical nuances.
In Part Two. Jeff Doyle will continue to offer more detailed analyses of several of the elements of Unsworth’s watercolour suite.
Image Credits
All images are by Ken Unsworth, titled “Untitled” 2007, watercolour on art paper, 40 x 27 cm. Photography by Paul Green.
