Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Above Ian Burn Portrait of the artist as an Australian including certain cultural contradictions 1983 Pen and Ink on paper 33.5x21.5 cm Private collection Right Ian Burn (Artist) W.F. Shaw (Painter of landscape) Value added landscape no. 10 1993 Oil and enamel on masonite with perspex 51.5x83.5x10.5cm Purchased 1996 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation of pictures to suggest the possibility of restructuring them. His friend and collaborator Mel Ramsden has described Burn's idea that 'you could number a picture in opposition to the way the eye "read" it' as 'primitive'.9Yet it was a seminal initiative, opening a conceptual window to entire worlds of speculation. Eventually Burn's investigations into the practice of art would suggest that this restructuring was not only possible, or even desirable, but absolutely necessary. If there is a figure in Re-ordered painting, whose is it? Is it the artist himself, in a sort of self-portrait, or is it the viewer looking at the work? Most likely it is both, since artist and viewer are equally essential to the transaction. The complicity between artist and spectator is registered in a number of works by Ian Burn, from his conceptual work in the 1960s to the 'value- added landscapes' of the early 1990s (see Burn's Value-added landscape no. 1 , 1993, QAG). In the 1960s, Bum used mirrors inscribed with texts, usually texts which interrogated visual images in a self­ reflexive manner. This is a quintessential modernist strategy: the material of the work is completely bound up in the problem it addresses, so that the work meditates, as it were, on the problems of its own existence. In Ian Burn's mirror pieces, this fit is perfect: mirrors not only reflect figures, the major subject of the western painting tradition, they also directly challenge the viewer to consider the presumptions and habits of looking at pictures. For instance, one mirror work of 1967 states that ‘No object implies the existence of any other' (QAG),10calling into question whether individual perception is relevant to a system of knowledge; and in Looking at a piece of glass 1967-68 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales),1 the final panel shows the face of the artist himself looking back at the viewer, as if in a mirror, while the text below points out the illusionistic possibilities of glass. In several other cases Burn underscored the meaning of these works by demonstrating it in photographs of himself looking into the mirror and back at the viewer. The essential interactivity of the process of seeing and understanding is revealed in the limpid mirror, which is nevertheless a trickster. These photographs suggest that the viewer of a picture — in this case a mirror — does all the work of looking and understanding and must take all the risks, while the painting in its irreducible dumbness is unable to give back any further clues about the wisdom or folly of the viewer's speculations. When one encounters these mirror pieces in art museums, the essential shock is not merely the discomfort of seeing one's own reflection where one expects to see images entirely indifferent to one's presence, but that the mirror challenges us about what art does, and what we do when we look at it. Many years later, in 1993, Ian Burn wrote: Both reflecting and framing, mirrors force a decision about how to position oneself as viewer — and how we position ourselves determines whether or not we are in (the frame of) the mirror. A mirror enables us to experience ourselves in aworld of appearances and as part of that world of appearances.12 The mirror was the object that enforced this speculation, and was for Ian Bum central to the mysteries of perception and, ultimately, to knowledge. The central paradox of perception, ofvision, is this: what is seemingly most available through the sense of sight is nevertheless still resolutely opaque to understanding. Ian Bum wrestled with this paradox for his entire life. Re-ordered painting was made at the very moment when Burn was on the point of abandoning drawing and painting in favour of a long exploration of the very conditions of making art. Burn was not to return to depictions of the human figure for many years, and then only episodically, but he never abandoned the problems signalled in Re-ordered painting: how artists and viewers address the central mysteries of human communication through visual images. If the figure vanished from the ground of Ian Burn's paintings, it never left the field of his inquiry. Julie Ewington is Curator, Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery. 298 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965