Throughout his 50-year career, the pioneering and visionary Australian conceptual artist Robert Macpherson has deftly and intuitively navigated the challenging territory at the nexus between the conceptual and the concrete, and in the process established a body of work that democratizes and domesticates conceptualism while at the same time elevates the everyday and the mundane to the status of cultural and artistic artefacts. His analytical approach to art combined with his belief in producing “art for art’s sake,” but doing so within a sound formal framework, situates Macpherson as one of the most unique and engaging artists of his generation, as expressed in “Robert Macpherson: The Painter’s Reach,” a major survey of MacPherson’s work which opened at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) on July 25 and continues until October 18, 2015.Curated by New York-based curator and writer Ingrid Periz, who has worked with the artist over many years, “The Painter’s Reach” includes more than 65 works including paintings, installations, ephemera, and works on paper spanning the artist’s 50 year career. It’s a revelatory and groundbreaking insight into the work of an extraordinarily talented artist with an extensive and fascinating oeuvre that defies categorization, having traversed many different visual languages and movements such as conceptualism, minimalism, and abstraction, and having drawn influence and inspiration from a wide range of sources including taxonomy, language, parochialism, body scale, format, art theory, the creation of meaning, the relationship between names and objects, as well as the culture and history of Australia, to name but a few. His employment of a wide range of recognizable and identifiable elements such as frogs, produce signs, bird houses, shoes, sandwiches, and painted shirts as the basis for intellectually, theoretically, and conceptually rigorous investigations and inquiries reveals his practice to be both incredibly accessible on one level but also deeply and satisfyingly complex on another level.Born in Brisbane in 1937, MacPherson is a self-taught artist whose first encounter with formal art education ended shortly after it began. During a discussion at the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2013, MacPherson recalls that on the orientation day one of the teachers got up, banged the desk, and said “if there is anyone in this class interested in art for art’s sake, get out!.” “He summed me up in one,” Macpherson said. “So I was only there for a week or so.” But although self-taught, MacPherson immersed himself in critical theory and art history, in particular the writings of Clement Greenberg. As well as being self-taught, MacPherson is also self-made, in the sense that he continued to work throughout the early stages of career, taking on a variety of jobs including cane-cutter, painter and docker, and supervisor of cleaners, to name a few. These everyday, normal jobs had a major impact on his practice, serving as inspiration and motivation for many of his works.“The Painter’s Reach” reveals that there are many facets to the genius and success of MacPherson’s multilayered and multidisciplinary practice, at the center of which the exhibition suggests is a desire to resolve, balance, reconcile, and rationalize. One of the standout characteristics of MacPherson’s practice is his consistent framing of quite complex concepts, ideas, and theories within wonderfully evocative and engaging narrative structures, some real and some imagined. Of equal importance is his early detachment from the formalism of traditional art education and the confines of what most would define as the traditional route and trajectory for a career artist, thus allowing his practice to develop and progress organically, without being sullied by, or encumbered with, the constraints of tradition and formalism. There is a strong argument for suggesting that the purity, clarity, breadth, and scope of his practice is a product of his isolation from the influences of formal art education and his detachment from the restraints of the typical artistic career trajectory. Also pivotal to the genius of MacPherson’s practice is his engagement with, and immersion in, the rituals, rites, activities, and experience of everyday life, which he observes and then interprets and translates with great insight and clarity. Another revealing dimension of MacPherson’s oeuvre is the existence of dual Robert Macphersons, both of whom emerge as the exhibition unfolds, and both of whom are perhaps a product of MacPherson’s remarkable level of commitment and the extent to which he immerses and engrosses himself in the characters, personalities, and experiences of the people and their experiences from which he so often draws inspiration and motivation. There’s the fun, humorous, witty, and theatrical Robert Macpherson who clearly who clearly enjoys making art and derives great joy and delight from his practice. Then there’s Robert Macpherson the sophisticated, intellectual, analytical, theoretical, conceptual, experimental, and pioneering creative visionary. But these two MacPherson s are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact one of the successes of MacPherson’s practice is his ability to reconcile these two personas, each of which becomes manifest within the multiple layers of meaning that are a hallmark of his work. Beyond these two characters, MacPherson takes on a number of peripheral roles including that of storyteller, choreographer, analyst, theorist, conceptualist, poet, painter, and historian. Both the witty and serious primary MacPhersons take center stage in the work “Three Paintings” 1981 which consists of three store-bought commercial paint brushes each paired with a text. The first reads “WHEN I DIP THE BRUSH IN PAINT THE BRISTLES BECOME COATED WITH PAINT AND MOVE BEYOND THIS POINT IS SUPERFLUOUS.” The second reads “WHEN I PURCHASE THE BRUSH THE HANDLE HAS BEEN COVERED WITH PAINT BY THE MANUFACTURER ANY MOVE BEYOND THIS POINT IS SUPERFLUOUS.” The third reads “DURING THE MANUFACTURE OF THE BRUSH THE HANDLE IS COATED WITH PAINT ANY MOVE BEYOND THIS POINT IS SUPERFLUOUS”The title of the GOMA exhibition is taken from a series of minimalist, poetic, and gestural paintings comprising nineteen thin white canvases each endowed with a single, wide stroke of black paint made by the artist while standing at arm’s length from the canvas. Titled “Scale from the Tool” (1976), the work epitomizes MacPherson’s interest in the dialogue between the body and the object as well as his fascination with painting, both as a concept and an action. MacPherson’s interest in the physicality of the art experience continues to manifest throughout the entire exhibition, in particular in his “Painting with Installation Instructions” 1978-79 series which comprises thirteen 30cmx30cm acrylic on canvas paintings each displayed with accompanying installation instructions. “Install this work ‘when the dark skies turn to blue again’,” is the installation instructions for one of the panels. Walking through the exhibition it becomes apparent that the works are displayed at an unusually low height, which might not seem significant, but it actually affects the entire experience, establishing the space as one of physical interaction and inclusion. According to GOMA, the curators and installers were in constant contact with MacPherson throughout the installation process to ensure that works were displayed in the correct manner, according to the artist’s vision.One of the defining series of MacPherson’s career is his “Frog Poems.” Although the exact inspiration and motivation for the series is unclear, many of the “Frog Poem” works pair the Latin species of frogs with an objects or objects that feature a characteristic related in one way or another to the frogs. In “17 FROG POEMS (FOR G. N. & A. W. (WHO BY EXAMPLE) TAUGHT THE KINDER WAY)” 1987–1989, for instance, 17 canvas stretcher beds are paired with the names of 17 burrowing or hibernating frogs. MacPherson’s epic work “1000 FROG POEMS: 1000 BOSS DROVERS (“YELLOW LEAF FALLING”) FOR H.S. 1996–2014” which was recently acquired by the gallery, further extends the conceptual basis of the “Frog Poem” series. Created over a period of 20 years in the persona of MacPherson’s alter ego “Robert Pene,” a ten-year-old primary school student from St Joseph’s Convent, Nambour, the work comprises 2400 individually numbered and named drawings of the drovers that were in charge of moving thousands of livestock and teams of stockmen and cooks along the great pastoral stock routes of Australia. Although the names of the boss drovers are those of real people, whose histories are known or documented, many of the portraits are imagined rather than derived from a photo or image of the subject. MacPherson’s “Frog Poem” framework functions as a point of continuity throughout his oeuvre and acts as an intriguing yet accessible point of entry to many of works, prompting the viewer to respond to the recognizable and familiar facets of its structure then inviting further exploration of the multiple layers of significance and meaning. The “Frog Poem” framework also acts as a sort of container for MacPherson’s ongoing and continued investigation of the association between names and objects – a fascination and obsession that he explores, navigates, and deciphers with amazing intuition, ingenuity, and skill.MacPherson’s democratization of the conceptual within narrative frameworks is perhaps most evident in the artist’s “Mayfair Bar Revisited” and “Peerless” works. The “Mayfair Bar Revisited” works take inspiration from a city coffee and lunch place that MacPherson frequented while working as a night supervisor at the City Hall. MacPherson’s almost superhuman observational skills once again saw far more in the act of sandwich making than most would see. The artist’s “Mayfair Bar Revisited” paintings reference a number of elements of sandwich making such as the different ways of cutting a slice of bread or the different ways of constructing a salmon and tomato sandwich. In the “Peerless” series MacPherson takes cues from the different ways that employees of a Peerless Dry Cleaners franchise described and sorted the colors of the garments. Each of the works in the “Peerless” series feature a framed drycleaners receipt exhibited alongside a number of canvases painted with colors inspired by the naming and order of the garment colors as listed on the receipt. MacPherson’s use of narrative frameworks, as seen in the “Peerless” and “Mayfair Bar Revisited” series, establishes accessible points of entry into his more complex conceptual explorations while at the same time enables him to further engage with the domestic and the colloquial in which he expresses a deep interest.The importance of both painting and text to MacPherson’s practice cannot be ignored. Throughout his career he has continuously returned to the act and concept of painting as well as the expression of text as both a literary and pictorial device as sources of stimulation and inspiration. MacPherson’s interest in text and painting coalesce in his “Mayfair” series features a series of painted words appropriated from nonprofessional roadside signs observed throughout Brisbane, advertising different forms of produce and food items ranging from cucumbers to lamingtons to apples. His engagement with amateur signage continues in the large-scale “Chitters” installation of 156 paintings which appropriates the language of signs advertising a plethora of local Queensland services and products including pine bark, mowing, cow manure, and stone walls, to name a few. With these works MacPherson not only democratizes the act of painting while at the same time takes the everyday from the ordinary to the extraordinary, he also challenges the viewer’s perception and concept of the importance and significance of the role of the painter by elevating the role of sign writer to one of fine artist.If MacPherson was born in America, chances are his name would be uttered in the same breath as the likes Robert Motherwell, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, with whose work MacPherson’s could be compared. However, with a practice strongly influenced and inspired by Australian culture and society, if he wasn’t an Australian artist he wouldn’t be who he is today, or have such an incredible body of work to his name. But that doesn’t mean that his work is celebrated or recognized as much as it should in his home country. In fact MacPherson is arguably one of Australia’s most underrated artists, as revealed in “Painters Reach.” Queensland’s GOMA should be commended for taking the initiative to celebrate and investigate MacPherson’s extraordinary career. And the curator, Ingrid Periz, should be congratulated for developing an exhibition that reflects and conveys the nature and characteristics of MacPherson’s practice, instead of taking the too familiar route of overthinking and overcurating an artist’s work. Some final words from MacPherson, taken from the text accompanying his 1975 exhibition at the IMA which reads as a sort of artist’s manifesto:An awareness of modern art history, a belief that all good art comes from previous art, my rules are formed within this context.An awareness of the means. I have no wish to subvert the means, the rectangle or negate the object.Juxtapositioning of means (surface, handling and ground) is content.My work makes no assumption beyond itself — then you have response, and that’s another story.An awareness of formal principles remains. Things happen in process and are left; I am surprised.
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