Through a glass darkly,
The Inaugural Guinness Contemporary Art Project

The title of the exhibition is an extract derived from St Paul but later modified by Walt Whitman, “As a Child I saw clearly but now I am a man I see as through a glass darkly”.  I have taken this to be a metaphor for the desired purity of Modernism which seeks to simulate a fresh, childlike vision, compared to the layered subjectivity and complex vision which comes with experience.

The artists in this exhibition have been selected because their works give the viewer a glimpse of significant connections between  personal and cultural memories.  By contrast with the minimal aesthetic which dominates contemporary practice, these artists create disturbing images of poetic intensity.  Their work is informed by Modernism but not limited by it.  Modernism tends to reduce memories and associations that may be seen as peripheral  to the underlying form or the essential core of meaning.  In the search for a pure vision we often repress subjectivity and the interaction of art with the world and all its cultural manifestations.  Memories and feelings that have been repressed are all the more poignant when they finally emerge into the public domain and it is this revelation which gives this exhibition its particular quality.  Through a Glass Darkly captures a sense of mystery and revives memories which may have been lost or deliberately repressed.  The works are poetic, lyrical and often strangely disturbing.

Christian Boltanski
This installation has been acquired by The Art Gallery of New South Wales and will be shown for the first time in Australia in this exhibition.

Four photographs hang on the wall illuminated only by reading lamps which clip onto their frames.  Beneath each frame a plain, old, tin, biscuit box is attached to the wall.  If we are familiar with Boltanski’s work, we will suspect that each box contains memorabilia which relates to the subjects of the images.  Indeed this is the case although the contents can only be guessed at by the viewer.

This guessing game relates to the processes of memory and imagination which are central to the theme of this exhibition.  Marcel Duchamp once teased the audience and himself by asking his friend and patron, Walter Arensberg, to place an unspecified object within a ball of string which was then sealed by two steel plates and bolted together, It rattles suggestively but we can only speculate about its secret.

Boxes, such as the ones in Boltanski’s  installation are widely used as repositories for secrets and memories, so that any viewer will be encouraged to speculate on the lost histories of the characters and situations shown in these old photos.  This set shows children at play, the time and place is obscure yet it could be a family in war time Europe, the children’s play is domestic yet could be taken for a childish enactment of SS brutality.

Louise Hearman
Many critics have speculated on the end of painting in an age where mechanical reproduction has saturated our environment with instant images.  It is true that most painting today seems to have vacated itself of the intensity and intimacy which was once generated slowly and lovingly by the painter and his model.  This loss of connectedness has led many painters to abandon their craft for video and other reproductive media or else to simulate these media as a gesture of criticism or valorisation.

Louise Hearman, on the other hand, persists in celebrating the traditional craft of painting while suggesting alternative timescales. The fields are often blurred as if seen fleetingly, yet the figures stay in suspension as if they have always been there, even if sometimes invisible.  These works are not a retreat from contemporary media, their temporal compression and dislocation are only possible in the light of our experience with mass media and virtual reality.

While her imagery is often related to art of the past and she clearly has an understanding of Symbolist painting and its moods, her work acts upon our own time, making the familiar extraordinary.  She  can stop the onward rush by creating a pocket of turbulence or an eddy in which our memories mingle and reform for a moment.

Bill Henson
For this exhibition Henson has created a new installation of his haunting crowd scenes.  These photographs were shot over a number of years, in different parts of the world.  Some of these images may have been taken amongst a crowd queuing for a vaporetto in Venice, or bustling through a shopping mall in Melbourne.  Within the room where they are to be installed  Henson will make use of lighting to bring out the mysterious and haunting quality of lives that emerge for a moment from the crowd only to disappear back into the mass of strangers. 

At times the viewer may feel uncomfortable, as if caught staring at a stranger on a bus.  The absorption in personal reveries or private worries that shows on these faces is caught momentarily on film allowing the viewer to stare and speculate, yet the sense of spying is made tangible by the intensity of the installation.  Some of the subjects seem to stare right through you when your eye settles for a moment on the individual amongst this dense arrangement that recreates the density of the crowd.

Susan Norrie
Susan Norrie is showing a challenging installation which reflects back over ten years of her own life and work.  Two of the most painful of her paintings from the 1980s were in fact duplicates of each other.   The Sublime and The Ridiculous exists in two versions, which were intended to be understood as a pair even though they did not necessarily hang together.  The large version is now in the collection of The National Gallery, Canberra.  The small version exists as a simulacrum yet it has an equal presence,  Painted in 1985 they clearly reflect the then topical concern with matters of authenticity and presence.

These early works will be hung together in the space where they were first exhibited in 1985.  In the exhibition itself, they will be identified by signs of their displacement. The new work in the exhibition will not bracket the earlier vision, thereby  creating a closure but will seek to explore the emotional field that still emanates from the 1985 work while providing possible openings for the viewer and for the artist.  Norrie’s paintings and installations, then, as now, reveal memories of personal pain which translate into shared humanity through the experience of loss, of altered time, of memories and her contemplations on the peculiarities of consciousness itself.

Ken Unsworth
This new installation will engage all the senses, from the next room it will be possible to hear a distant but familiar sound of vacuum cleaners.  When you turn the corner into the room a lingering perfume will greet you.  Hanging from ropes, throughout the space, will be five giant skins made of latex.  Each skin will be tugged at by a different kind of vacuum cleaner, sucking at its loose fleshy drapes.

The skins will be dusted with talcum powder, a necessary part of the process when working with latex yet emphasised here to bring out the bodily nature of the material.  The scent will suggest the context of la toilette, while the hanging skins are more suggestive of a charnel house. 

In another corner, five cupboards stand partly open showing piles of ash within, each cupboard accompanied by another vacuum cleaner.  The juxtaposition of life and death is a recurrent aspect of Unsworth’s installation and performance, yet it is always relieved by humour.  Joseph Beuys has long been a profoundly influential figure for Unsworth and this work reminds us of his constantly humorous references to bodily processes.  It may be that the sucking vacuums will gag and suck unevenly, producing suggestive body noises.