Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'YOU CAN'T MAKE CANONICAL PICTURES FROM CATEGORICAL CONFUSION' Ian Burn Re-ordered painting Julie Ewington Facing page Ian Burn Australia 1939-93 Re-ordered painting 1965 Oil on canvas 80.4x90.5cm Purchased 1995 with the assistance of the Queensland A rt Gallery Functions Fund Queensland Art Gallery Above Ian Burn Self-portrait 1962 Pencil on paper 35.5x28.5cm Judith A. W ilkinson Collection But you can't paint mongrel critic's pictures like Re-ordered painting on purpose. You can't deliberately fail. You can't successfully fail. You cant make canonical pictures from categorical confusion. Mel Ramsden 1 I n the early 1960s, when Ian Burn was a student at the National Gallery - School in Melbourne, drawing was the essential discipline of an artist. To accurately represent the human figure was still a fundamental ideal in the waning years of the European academic tradition, and drawing from the model was the means of instilling this capability into the developing student. In this pedagogical regime, perception, conception and artistic project were thus intimately bound up with issues presented by looking at the human form. Often the most available model, certainly the least expensive, was the artist himself, and self-portraits abound in the European tradition of art for this reason. Ian Burn drew, painted and photographed his own face and body many times in the course of his life as an artist. Yet from the outset his enterprise was not confined to an examination in the naturalist manner of the lineaments of his own reflection, and it was certainly never an exploration of his personality in expressionist terms. Rather, Bum chose to study his own face as the subject, and arguably as the emblem, of the artist's crucial activity of visual interrogation, which he later called 'looking' and 'seeing'. In order to situate Re-ordered painting 1965 (Queensland Art Gallery) within the continuity of Ian Burn's interests in looking and picturing, it is necessary to understand this discipline of drawing the self. Re-ordered painting was one of the first works Ian Burn made after moving to London in 1965. This was a crucial junction in his career, just after leaving Australia to live overseas and at the beginning of a period when his artistic horizons widened dramatically under the direct experience of the metropolitan centres of modernist art. His timing was excellent. He arrived at an extraordinary moment in modern art, when young artists, impatient of received wisdom and influenced by the social and intellectual turmoil of the period, undertook a thorough reconsideration of the foundations of their practice. The rigour and passion of the enterprise were immediately congenial to Ian Burn's inquiring temperament. He plunged straight into this work of radical revision, commencing his long collaboration with Mel Ramsden, later allying himself with a group of artists who createdwhat was soon dubbed Conceptual Art, and then joining other artists in the various 'Art & Language' groups.2 Re-ordered painting bears the marks of that complex and rich moment of transition. The painting is simultaneously a salute and a farewell to Australia and Australian traditions in painting, and a response to arrival in Europe, the locus classicus of art. The solitary upright figure, conceived in traditional terms, stands in an Australian- coloured landscape. This was the last painting Burn made in these high-keyed summer colours. The artist felt that in the cooler light of the northern hemisphere it was impossible to use the saturated beach hues — blue, yellow, sunburnt flesh pink — that had characterised his recent paintings in Australia.3In these works Burn had explored the modernist visual construction of the Australian landscape, with Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams as his mentors; many were based around St Kilda, the same Melbourne beach that Nolan had painted in the early 1940s, but Burn also borrowed from the heightened palette and radically simplified constructions of Nolan's slightly later Wimmera paintings. The traces of those St Kilda works are still present in Re-ordered painting but Ian Burn had begun to leave landscape (the great theme of Australian painting) behind. With this painting, he commenced the project that would preoccupy him for many years: exploring the very conditions of looking at and making art. Thus while it starts out from the heritage of the figure in the landscape, Re-ordered painting , as the title plainly tells us, shifts the basic elements of traditional painting into a new and unstable configuration. It is at the same time an investigative exercise and a manifesto. As Mel Ramsden suggests, 294 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965