Peter Neilson - News

ONE STEP AHEAD Peter Neilson 2006

12:04am Fri. July 6th 2007

And having read Adorno's position that art's impulse to objectivate the fleeting, not the permanent, may well run through the whole of its history;

And bowing low before Benjamin's final reading of Paul Klee's painting - Angelus Novus - as the 'angel of history' blown backwards into the future by a storm from Paradise while the chain of events we call 'progress' is seen by our angel as one single catastrophe which piles up wreckage and hurls it at the angel's feet;

And after musing on the 'missing link', that so intrigued Greenberg into his old age, between Picasso's Rose Period and Braque's Fauvism and the 'unimaginable, solely intuitive leap into Cubism(my own take being that conversations between Picasso and Gertrude Stein in 1905 during her daily sittings, over three months, for his famous portrait of her, was Picasso's introduction to her ideas that art's new role in the twentieth century was to express a 'continuous present' which lead directly to the Cubist re-viewing of the visual subject: instantly, from all sides, all at once - a continuous present);

And after disagreeing with John Updike's savaging of the sainted, satanic Pollock's painting Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952, 'with its unhappy discovery of orange paint', as a regression of style, painted years after Pollock had moved on from his 'drip-paint' style, and Updike's rejoicing in its banishment to an empire outpost in Australia 'whence it will come but rarely' to trouble those populating the centre of the universe, it was but a small step through the labyrinth of my library to re-read Sherman E. Lee's history of China's Southern Sung landscape style(1127-1277AD) painted by practitioners of the 'Spontaneous mode' with its extremely bold 'flung-ink' techniques revealing 'abrupt and arbitrary personality', and a 'pictorial parallel to the mystic's enlightenment, as well as to the individual's revolt against the times of trouble that were the last days of the Dynasty';

And after reading film critic Parker Tyler's early review stating that Pollock's labyrinths were visual metaphors which 'even the most unprepared spectator would immediately grasp' inferring that it existed as a widely recognized visual metaphor before it was adopted by Pollock and that 'film noir' was largely responible for the labyrinth's disemination throughout post-WW2 visual culture;

Then and only then, do I clear my mind of the static of theories and worthy ideas, take up my brush and canvas, which stare back at me across eight hundred years of raging history, and in the gathering silence listen with Aragon the young and Rimbaud the even younger, for directions, seeking a way through the 'calculated confusion', on the unmapped journey to Nowhere Known.

At last, painting is out of the spotlight: old, but tired of carrying the avant-garde can for every philosophical statement imaginable and pleased to hand that part of life over to the 're-producables', allowing itself to be itself at its core: tough, individual, elite; and, for perhaps the first time, able to say something about what's going on IN the spotlight. Painting continues: outrunnig history - one fleeting step ahead.

(This statement by Peter Neilson was first published in the invitation to his July, 2006 exhibition of paintings and drawings by Australian Galleries at The Depot Gallery, Dank Street, Waterloo, Sydney, Australia)