Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Right Ian Burn with his work 1-6 glass!mirror piece 1967. Photograph courtesy Avril Burn Ian Burn No object implies the existence of any other 1967 Glass mirror with adhesive lettering 60x60cm Purchased 1995 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Re-ordered painting is an essay in deliberate confusion. It rejects an elaboration of the established canons of painting in order to work through the possibilities of their refusal. Most precisely, this 're-ordering' in the title embodies a critical relationship to tradition, and could be undertaken only because Ian Bum had studied the representation of the figure in a long artistic apprenticeship. Now he would take it apart, physically. This work had to be undertaken on the canvas: indeed it could be accomplished nowhere else at that time. (Later it would move onto different terrain: photographs, mirror pieces, writing, sculptures, even musical performance.) Re-ordered painting was thus one of a group ofworks inwhich Burn explored how viewers approached paintings, literally how they 'ordered' them, perceptually and conceptually. (There are two other paintings in the series, Re-ordered painting no.2 and Re-ordered painting no.3, both dated 1965, and Left to right painting, also of 1965, which explore the same interest in a gradually more reduced and radical progression.)4The deliberately contradictory elements in Re-ordered painting embody Bum's struggle to understand the contemporary conditions of artistic practice on the 'shop-floor' of art, as it were. He quickly resolved to pursue this inquiry with non-representational works: in Re-ordered painting no.2 and Re-ordered painting no.3 he abandoned the figure to concentrate on the relationships between flat shapes and numbers; in Left to right painting, he reiterated in a more refined form his interest in the cultural processes of looking at ('reading') a painting; and between 1965 and 1967 Burn made a number of paintings that were completely non-representational, often concentrating on the fine reflective surface as the location of the interaction between artist and viewer.5 Let us now examine Re-ordered painting. At first glance it is extremely simple, and its elements may be quickly summarised. The canvas is almost square, the archetypal field of the painter. Ablocky, faceless figure looms, almost shambles, across a shallow pictorial space, which is segmented into several colours, each numbered. Mel Ramsden has written that he remembers thinking at the time how awkward the work was: 'The biomorphic cod-Cubist space doesn't fit at all with the stencilled numbers'.6At first glance it seems that the figure inhabits a geometric universe, where everything is in its correct place, neatly tagged. The flat untextured paint is in the vernacular used by many artists and styles in the 1960s, from Pop art to colour-field painting. The paint handling is purposefully anti-expressive, and in this respect Re-ordered painting proclaims a decided allegiance to the exploratory traditions of early twentieth- century modernist art, seeming to recall the paintings of Fernand Léger, whom Ian Burn greatly admired, the industrial- mechanical figures of the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer, and other artists infatuated with the radical simplicity of contemporary urban forms. However, this is a more complex picture than the first encounter suggests. It is evidently not a representation of an actual figure-in-space drawn from any of the available pictorial styles of the period, but rather an analytical account of the traditional relations of a figure depicted in space and between figure and ground. This last sentence indicates something of the rich theoretical and practical issues Ian Burn was grappling with here. Take the figure, for a start. Whatever the claims of the western mimetic tradition, artists are acutely aware of the constructed nature of their representations. They know better than anyone that they are making pictures of people, rather than 'real' versions of them. Moreover, the spaces in which figures are placed are only accounts of actual spatial relations, made possible by traditions of depiction which are culturally determined, such as the western conventions of perspective. Finally, for the best part of a century before Ian Bum made Re-ordered painting, European artists had been exploring the peculiarities of their own conventions of representation under the influence of several alternative systems of picturing that had recently come to prominence: the work of Japanese artists, especially Ukiyo-e printmakers, had made a profound impact on western artists since its first appearance in Europe in the early 1860s, because of its radically different organisation of pictorial space; the development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century revealed the constructed nature of their pictures to artists, many of whom adopted photography as an artistic tool; and in the early twentieth century the impact of symbolic abstractions from other cultures opened up to western artists the possibilities of representations that were non-figurative. All this complex theoretical and historical baggage informs the deceptive simplicity of Re-ordered painting. In the resolute flatness of the paint, in the non-naturalistic colours, and most of all in the radical simplification of the image, Re-ordered painting undertakes to represent a figurative painting, rather than provide an image of an actual person. In short, Re-ordered painting is a commentary or a proposition about painting, about forms of abstraction, and, as we shall see later, about the business of imaging and perception. Indeed, it is possibly an intentional parody of the high seriousness of figurative picture-making: the figures and numbers recall popular books of instruction about painting and jokes about 'painting-by-numbers' which are, if one is an artist of a philosophical turn of mind, rather too close to home to be ignored. Ian Bum embraces the challenge of this vernacular wisdom, engaging with the joke seriously. Paradoxically, then, despite its jaunty colours and apparent confidence, Re-ordered painting asserts that there is no certainty in matters of representation. So is this figurative or non-representational art? In Re-ordered painting, Bum engages simultaneously with both figuration and abstraction, the major artistic modes of the day. He reveals that these tendencies, rivals for artistic legitimacy in Australia in Burn's years as a young artist, were more closely related than is usually thought. In Re-ordered painting, figuration and abstraction are interlocked, as they were in the work of many Australian painters throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when the contending merits of both tendencies were played out in vigorous debates between 296 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965