The artist
Peter Tyndall (b.1951) is an enduring favourite with the Melbourne art establishment. He has enjoyed generous patronage from public and private sectors and has now been accorded a retrospective at Buxton Contemporary Art Museum. Such career surveys have generally been spread around Melbourne’s lesser public and semi-public spaces, such as Tarrawarra, Heide and The Ian Potter Museum at University of Melbourne, when not accommodated within the NGV’s dedicated space for contemporary Australian work, the Ian Potter Centre, at Federation Square. The Tyndall retrospective thus also marks a more prestigious assignment for Buxton Contemporary.
The gallery is a semi-public enterprise, part of University of Melbourne’s VCA campus. The show is curated by Samantha Comte and Simon Maidment (in some press, by Doug Hall AM and Dr Claire Roberts) and is the result of a year’s patient consultations with the artist, includes over two hundred works covering fifty years of his output. The show occupies both floors, and in exhibition area compares well with Heide or Tarrawarra. Given the occasion however, it is frankly disappointing that the equally exacting catalogue was not available in time for the show’s five month run. This is poor management.
Yet on reflection, this may be no more than the show deserves. The
artist’s appeal is in many ways mysterious; the work arid, brittle and largely
devoted to graphics cliché and platitude; does little to invite closer
inspection, rewards still less when it does. The problem is not simply one of
perspective, or the vantage point offered by 2023, although this too is unkind
to the artist’s formal concerns, but rather with the ends to which these are
put, to the implied role of the artist in the work.
The artist’s work emerged in the mid seventies, following an initial
interest in the Lyrical Abstraction of the day, in the wake of a Larry Poons
perhaps, later drifting into more impasto, Robert Ryman territory, to judge
from smaller works in the first room. These developments surprisingly run more
or less in parallel with elaborate, site specific performances, an aspect of
the artist’s oeuvre that receives scant coverage in the show. Pictorially, the work
culminates in a diagram of a square or rectangle with two parallel lines
projecting from the top; this standing for a picture and its hanging support. This
picture within the picture in turn is offered as a metaphor for the business of
interpretation, through the title ‘detail A Person Looks At A Work Of
Art/someone looks at something’. The ‘detail’ is meant to urge some greater
whole to the arrangement, although this is trivial, since no one supposes any
work stands in perfect isolation. And obviously we do not have a person
depicted in the picture. Instead we have a picture within a picture, so that
the implied viewing is really concerned with maintaining these outlines or
boundaries to a picture, within the confines of the bigger picture. This
arrangement pleases the artist so much all subsequent works are titled ‘detail A
Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something’.
‘detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone
looks at something LOGOS/HA HA (Untitled painting No 3) 1974’
In 1988 this formulation is amended to include ‘LOGOS/HA HA’, reflecting the artist’s deep scepticism with titles, indeed language. The same text is used as substitution for details of medium and dimensions with the addition of ‘CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION’, this somehow seen as a ‘critique’ of museum or art historical practices. Similarly, dates for works are often bracketed over puzzling periods, such as 1997-2001 or 1994-2008, and while baffling as ‘critique’, the impression is mainly of conspicuous evasion, an anxious control over even the source and substance of work. But distractions at the margins are the least of the problems. The central image of a picture and its support merits scrutiny for a start. Obviously not all pictures rely upon picture rails or parallel hanging supports, apart from public galleries. It is hardly the exclusive or even predominant means of displaying pictures, so as a universal model, it is a little disingenuous. Aside from the practicalities of picture support, there is the metaphor that this recursive structure (pictures within pictures) stands for perception or understanding at its broadest. Here we encounter formidable objections.
The distinction between person, perception and object is simply untenable in an era when theorists on all sides roundly condemned any such relation. The hermaneuticist would insist upon an historical and geopolitical context for person and object, the poststructuralist would deny perception divorced from psychology, and psychology divorced from ideology, while the old school analytical thinker would first like to know which properties of an object are and are not strictly ‘visible’? On all counts Tyndall’s formulation looks at best naive, at worst lazy if not puerile. The lesson may be that it is best not to ask too much of titles. But perhaps we err in expecting intellectual rigour from the artist’s concepts (even those of a purported Conceptual Artist). We fare better to treat them more as a dismissive encapsulation that merely signals the artist’s need to distance himself from the whole issue of interpretation, to in a sense, confine or quarantine meaning.
‘detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something LOGOS/HA HA’ (Installation
view) 1974-1993
Why the artist should feel this need we can never really know, some residual guilt or discomfort in his private life, presumably. But plainly, it cannot serve as criticism of cultural practice when the appeal is precisely to ‘CULTURAL CONSUMPTION’ in most descriptions offered in place of medium or dimensions. One cannot participate in culture by opting out. The tactic flags some deep-seated ambivalence on the artist’s part.
Once we look at the work as an exercise in resisting personal or particular meaning, we see how central concepts to the artist’s project align with the deliberate withholding or obscuring of details to the work. And once we see the work as insulated from the artist in this way, we see why the work undergoes an abrupt change from expressive, gestural abstraction to austere, print-derived illustration. Yet the work no more than masquerades as impersonal, anonymous, and often it is only in the attention to paint application that we realise that is just that: a charade.
‘detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone
looks at something LOGOS/HA HA’ 1974-1991
Similarly, as figures and texts are added to the pictures, these too become a measure of what the artist keeps at arm’s length. It is instructive to note the use of family, school groups and children in this regard. Again, these are hardly the usual encounters with pictures, much less art, or indeed family or schooling occasions, but really it is to construct a further anxiety to the artist’s privacy. Period costumes to the figures add to the distance and a certain theatricality.
‘detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone
looks at something LOGOS/HA HA’ 1989
The motif of the square with two lines projecting from the top is augmented sometime in the late eighties, rotated to a diagonal and extended to a repeating pattern in yellow. It remains as a background throughout the rest of the artist’s career. It is the networking theme reduced to decoration. Two further developments are of note. The first is the use of dated comic-strip figures with fairly obvious insertion of the artist’s signature motif. This is a more light-hearted treatment of the theme, but the effect is tellingly weak or clunky. The artist retreats into Pop Art as a measure of anonymous convention, but coming twenty years after the movement, the move is more camp or camp follower than cool.
‘detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone
looks at something LOGOS/HA HA’ 1984
The second development arises in 1988 when the artist adopts a five panel format (a quintych?) pacing the letters to the word logos, which he takes in a biblical form (and Latin alphabet) to be ‘the divine word that speaks the universe into being’. It is hard to know what to make of this bid for pretension. It is probably best understood as simply an integration of text and image, an abiding concern. The outer panels are devoted to a closely cropped L and S, these prompting readings of the panels in between as part letter, part image.
‘detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone
looks at something LOGOS/HA HA’ (The Passing of Narcissus) 1996
A later example of the five panel format is the curious ‘The Passing of Narcissus’ (1996) invoking Greek myth (and reflection) with two men, presumably carrying a coffin, echoing the two Os to logos, the G perhaps then attributed to the central ellipse. Gee. At a guess, this is around 175 X 350 cm. As graphic design, it is flat and heavy in every sense. There is no depth or scale to the figures, no refinement to typeface or font. It lumbers as design because it struggles with an impossible brief for coded or cryptic content. It wants to be a detached evasion of private or personal meaning, but only superficially and the compromise satisfies neither.
Nevertheless the artist’s approach holds great appeal for Melbourne’s art world and in part may be explained by a strain of asceticism that runs through the likes of John Brack (1920-1999), Robert Hunter (1947-2014, Paul Partos (1943-2002) John Nixon (1949-2020) and Lesley Dumbrell (b.1941). It is a strain that revels in discipline, method and restraint. In part it has to do with timing and art history. Tyndall’s work coincides with the rise of Neo-Expressionism in Australia and looks all the more striking for the contrast. The difference is really between artists looking to Europe (or at least to the pages of Flash Art) for Neo-Expressionism and those looking to New York (or at least to the pages of ArtForum) for New Image Painting and P&D. From the outset Tyndall’s work was orientated toward New York and the interest in diagram and ideogram stems from the drift from Pop Art to text relations pursued by John Baldessari (1931-2020) and furthered by his student at CalArts, Matt Mullican (b.1951) amongst others. Mullican’s interest in corporate logos, signage and standard graphic symbols are a close match and model for Tyndall’s work by the late seventies. Indeed, even in the present survey there are distinct affinities between their walls of assembled posters and texts.
Wall display (Label 64 to catalogue)
Initially Tyndall seemed a more inhibited, analytical sensibility. While the bulk of local contemporaries were keen to wear their hearts on sleeves, his preference was somewhere to the rear. But while Mullican delved deeper into encryption and ideology, Tyndall is actually intent upon an anti-expressionism, an acute restraint or appeal to the initiated. The work smuggles in compliance and culture under a frisson in the paperwork, a petulant transgression.
In retrospect, the artist addresses a world of imagery now utterly transformed by the digital revolution and from which little can be of use to the present or future artists. The work responds to the formalist project of abstraction, particularly in America, and the quest for pure self-reference that expires sometime in the seventies. The work resurrects imagery, somewhat in the wake of Pop Art and print sources, but ultimately this is too coy, too repressed, too... what’s the word? The favour Tyndall has enjoyed through all this however also belongs to a world now lost, absorbed into current agendas of collective identity and a hopelessly splintered culture.
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