Victoria Lynn-History Painting

Stieg Persson’s new work con­sid­ers the moral dimen­sion of paint­ing. The works tack­le some of the eth­i­cal conun­drums of our time by com­mu­ni­cat­ing cer­tain atti­tudes to con­tem­po­rary events. These works eschew post­mod­ernist irony, or appro­pri­at­ed imagery and seek, instead, to express out­rage, sor­row and a sense of per­ver­si­ty.

There was a peri­od in Aus­tralian art, some thir­ty years ago, and in Amer­i­can art, six­ty years ago, when painters saw neces­si­ty in con­fin­ing the paint­ed image to its con­stituent parts – its com­po­si­tion, colour, tex­ture and form. Artists at the van-guard of con­tem­po­rary art at that time react­ed against what they regard­ed as art’s over-reliance on nature and nar­ra­tive until that point. Their abstrac­tion was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary ges­ture made with a moral con­vic­tion. This was the gen­er­a­tion who taught Stieg Pers­son at art school. Pers­son has referred to him­self as a Green­ber­gian trapped inside a post-mod­ernist body (refer­ring to the influ­en­tial mod­ernist art crit­ic, Clement Green­berg, who her­ald­ed the pri­ori­ti­sa­tion of for­mal­ism in paint­ing). Indeed, his paint­ings pos­sess an abstract poise, ten­der pas­sages, strong com­po­si­tions and dynam­ic forms. For­mal­ly, they are cap­ti­vat­ing works and, as such, reveal their debt to the strin­gent flat­ness and com­po­si­tion­al log­ic of Colour­field paint­ing.

Except, they are most­ly black – blue black, brown black, grey black, cool and warm. When they are not black, the paint­ings con­tain sien­na, umber, red ochre, mush­room grey and cream – sub­dued colours that shift with changes in light. As many writ­ers have not­ed, both in Aus­tralia and inter­na­tion­al­ly, the use of black com­mu­ni­cates themes of memo­r­i­al, loss and the inex­plic­a­ble side of our sub-con­scious. Black can also sug­gest a kind of emp­ty­ing out, the lack of light, the dark­ness of night or of the mind. Fur­ther­more, today black is racial­ly sig­nif­i­cant. For exam­ple, the Amer­i­can painter Glenn Ligon uses black sym­bol­i­cal­ly to com­ment upon the mul­ti­ple mean­ings of the word ‘colour’, while Aus­tralian artist Des­tiny Dea­con reclaims ‘polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect’, archival cul­tur­al forms in order to forge a larg­er and more com­plex under­stand­ing of black iden­ti­ty.

Even though in Stieg Persson’s work black occu­pies a large part of the can­vas, it is invari­ably used as a back­ground colour or tone from which the forms emerge. Depend­ing on the imagery, Persson’s black can sug­gest a sense of memo­r­i­al, or death, but its sheer flat­ness pre­vents the paint­ings from head­ing in direc­tions from which they can­not return. They do not have the var­ie­gat­ed abstract field of an Ad Rein­hardt paint­ing, and their illu­sion­is­tic imagery over­turns ref­er­ences to the mono­chrome. Persson’s paint­ings have the refined bal­ance of a stringed instru­ment. The rela­tion­ship of image to ground plays var­i­ous, albeit uneasy, tunes, while main­tain­ing a for­mal and serene rig­or.

As an artist who has paint­ed for over twen­ty years, Pers­son has always been aware of both the vis­cer­al delights and intel­lec­tu­al prob­lems of paint­ing. Even though oth­er equal­ly enrich­ing prac­tices such as per­for­mance, video, film, inter­ac­tive media and instal­la­tion have dom­i­nat­ed over the last four decades, paint­ing has con­tin­ued to take a vari­ety of paths. In essence, it has widened its own terms of ref­er­ence. After mod­ernism, paint­ing could no longer be regard­ed as a sin­gu­lar tra­jec­to­ry of avant-garde prac­tice, with one belief sys­tem usurp­ing anoth­er in a pro­gres­sive move towards abstrac­tion. Today, there con­tin­ue to be fierce adher­ents to the many painter­ly styles of mod­ernism: expres­sion­ist ges­ture, abstract for­mal­ism, cubism and, with­in Aus­tralia, the land­scape tra­di­tion. Persson’s does not belong to this group, how­ev­er, because his paint­ings encom­pass dif­fer­ent hori­zons – an inter­est in the endur­ing themes of death, memo­r­i­al and his­to­ry; inspi­ra­tion from every­day found mate­ri­als and ideas; and a long term inter­est in paint­ing as a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion or ‘lan­guage’. Rather than being ges­tur­al, his works are focused around a spe­cif­ic point.

Stieg Persson’s oeu­vre sits more with­in the spir­it of Goya, Ger­i­cault or Courbet, the painters through­out his­to­ry who have rep­re­sent­ed con­tem­po­rary events. Persson’s works have often made ref­er­ence to the theme of death and com­mem­o­ra­tion: the use of heraldic imagery, his frag­ment-like appro­pri­a­tions of Heavy Met­al imagery in the 1990s, the John Donne series in 1989–90, and his more recent work, Dance Macabre, a paint­ing that depicts a flur­ry of bleached bones chore­o­graphed across a red ochre back­ground. His­to­ry Paint­ing holds with­in its heart a small news­pa­per trib­ute to Nguyen Tuong Van, an Aus­tralian cit­i­zen who was hanged in Sin­ga­pore in 2006 for drug relat­ed offences. The death notice (under the name Nguyen Caleb Van, his bap­tismal name) appeared adja­cent to the notice for Jus­tice Marks, a senior mem­ber of the judi­cial bench in Vic­to­ria who cam­paigned for human rights. It was a cru­el irony. The cross bones on the can­vas are like a giant excla­ma­tion: NO! The Fourth Howard Min­istry wish­es you a very Bie­der­meier Christ­mas, has a tree bedecked with the eyes of a pea­cock feath­er, with a tsuna­mi wave of bones at its base. Bei­der­meier is a peri­od of art and design in Cen­tral Europe dur­ing the peri­od 1815 – 1848. The term was orig­i­nal­ly a par­o­dy direct­ed at the depoliti­cised and petit-bour­geois con­cerns of the era. The title of Persson’s work is a cri­tique of the increas­ing depoliti­ci­sa­tion of the Aus­tralian mid­dle class and its pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with real estate and domes­tic com­fort. The title also makes ref­er­ence to the Howard Government’s com­plic­i­ty in this. One must nev­er con­fuse the sub­ject of a paint­ing with the paint­ing itself, yet these works explore a moral and eth­i­cal dimen­sion. They seek to com­ment on con­tem­po­rary events, while always main­tain­ing their sta­tus as paint­ings.

As has been high­light­ed by David O’Halloran, Stieg Persson’s work evokes a fas­ci­na­tion with the found object, draw­ing on a mod­ernist tra­di­tion that extends from Duchamp to Beuys. Pers­son does not have to look very far for these ‘found’ images and ideas: they are in and around his stu­dio in St Kil­da. They are the traces of every­day life. How­ev­er, the objects are of course then paint­ed. A coil of pic­ture wire, found lying around the stu­dio, is trans­formed into a gos­samer-like tum­ble of lines. (In Duchamp’s hands it would remain res­olute­ly every­day). The plane tree out­side the stu­dio win­dow, with its win­ter pom-poms, becomes a sin­is­ter Christ­mas tree. (Where­as, for Beuys, the oak tree was a sym­bol of envi­ron­men­tal replen­ish­ment). The names for var­i­ous genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied crops, such as Invig­or, are inspi­ra­tion for the sticky, raised sur­face in the recent ‘flower’ paint­ings. In these works, the every­day is eclipsed by process, for these works take a long time to make. The recent ‘flower’ paint­ings, for exam­ple, can take up to four months to form, lying flat in the stu­dio as the oil and alkyd resin dries. The process, then, lit­er­al­ly deter­mines form, as the artist does to the flower, what genet­ic mod­i­fi­ca­tion does to nature.

The con­tin­u­al stream of email spam that arrives in the artist’s inbox, is trans­posed and trans­formed in the paint­ings into a net­work of flow­ing lines of text. The use of text in art goes back to at least the Amer­i­can post­min­i­mal­ist and con­cep­tu­al art of the late 1960s and ear­ly 1970s. Since the ear­ly 1980s, Stieg Pers­son has been inter­est­ed in what he calls the ‘almost com­mu­ni­ca­tion’ of paint­ing. Text in Persson’s paint­ings is large­ly inde­ci­pher­able, either because it is in a goth­ic script, or the words them­selves make no sense, com­mu­ni­cat­ing, most recent­ly, in the mode of those mis­spelt spam emails that try to get past var­i­ous fil­ters, for exam­ple, ‘vjja­gra’ (sic). Persson’s ear­li­er use of the abstract arabesque also ref­er­ences writ­ing, with­out actu­al­ly depict­ing lan­guage. These flour­ish­es of white curlicues are like an elab­o­rate script that has been frozen in a state of unfurled tran­quil­li­ty.

The artist’s use of text comes to be a metaphor for the act of paint­ing itself. On one hand, paint­ing com­mu­ni­cates through its own build­ing blocks – colour, form, tex­ture, com­po­si­tion, image. On the oth­er hand, painting’s inter­nal log­ic, which iron­i­cal­ly is made up of these very same ele­ments, cre­ates a suite of visu­al rela­tion­ships that can be con­tra­dic­to­ry, open to mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions, or can fold in on them­selves, sealed in silence. This is the ‘almost com­mu­ni­ca­tion’ of paint­ing, that so encour­ages this artist to keep paint­ing. After twen­ty years, we can eas­i­ly recog­nise both the lan­guage and tem­pera­ment of Persson’s works – they dis­solve the mod­ernist par­a­digm while at the same time extend­ing its for­mal strengths.

Vic­to­ria Lynn, August 2006