Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Australian painters and critics .7 Re-ordered painting recapitulates the eclectic combinations of abstract painting styles and the western figurative legacy which were the most common Australian responses to abstraction: few artists were able to abandon representation completely. In Re-ordered painting, for example, the swirling shapes in gold and blue can be read as a lunging figure and its outstretched arm. But the figuration in the work is unstable: we can just as reasonably see all the areas of colour as elements in a pattern. Thus Re-ordered painting offers two possible interpretations, or more persuasively, suggests the necessity of oscillating between them. This oscillation between figure and ground was a staple of modernist painting from the early years of the twentieth century. ('Figure and ground' refers technically not only, or even principally, to figures in a painting, but to objects represented on the ground of the work. In painting, the underlying layer of colour on the canvas is called 'the ground'.) As the complex cultural environment of the twentieth century developed, and particularly after the cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque were understood, artists and critics became increasingly aware of the culturally ordained ways of seeing inherent in western art and the instability of these pictorial conventions. Re-ordered painting also puts into play two explicitly contradictory routes to understanding. First, the viewer can follow the culturally ordained path learned from reading European texts, scanning left to right across the canvas, from the figure on the left to the red band on the right. This is, as painters know very well, the habitual way western people 'read' paintings. The second route is anti-systematic, even though it uses numbers, the ancient guarantee of order .8 For if one follows the number sequence from one to six (and there are two sixes on the far right) there is no 'sense' to be had from the picture. The sequence is discontinuous, even absurd. It reveals nothing about the place of the figure in the patches of colour, nothing about the overall meaning of the painting. Burn exposes the usual sense of pictorial 'order', confounding our expectations 'YOU CAN'T MAKE CANONICAL PICTURES FROM CATEGORICAL CONFUSION' 297