Text by Conny Dietzschold
On the occasion of the celebrations of the opening of Stage 3 renovations of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Sydney we have great pleasure to introduce you to an exhibition with an architectural / geometrical background which in art historic terms is known as Concrete Constructive Art. The exhibition has been curated by Conny Dietzschold with artworks from New Zealand, Germany, England and Switzerland and different states of Australia.
In an exemplary manner, the exhibition reflects the spread of an artistic idea beyond national borders - the idea of creating art which explores the issues of dynamics and inertia, balance and tension, chance and order, spontaneity and calculability as a means to representing the basic issues of life, but without providing a reproduction of the visible world. The degree to which this task was fulfilled can be seen in the selection of works which express a great diversity of forms i.e. paintings, relief's, sculptures, objects, photography, new media and installations.
With artworks from five countries, the presentation illustrates the boundary transcending exchange of currents and ideas, while providing insight into the artistic concerns of artists in Europe and the region of Australia and New Zealand. Concrete Art - this was the area of modern art, which began in Europe around 1910, to detach itself entirely from the reproduction of the object, and in the face of much resistance, continued to develop and assert itself as one strain in the art of the twentieth century. We must not allow ourselves to be led astray by the fact that the term 'concrete' is to be distinguished from 'abstract' - the latter denoting art which does not relinquish its relationship to reality. On the contrary, this potential confusion inspires to determine the term a little closer.
For by definition it is the autonomy of pictorial means which constitutes Concrete Art, their insistence that the pictorial world is a world in and of itself, founded on surface, space, line, colour, light, light/dark contrasts and movement. The second fundamental characteristic of Concrete Art is its calculability, the candid disclosure of its principles, such as symmetry, rotation, progression, and serial order - in short, its affinity to mathematics.
Of essential importance for the emergence of Concrete Art were the De Stijl movement and Constructivism: movements which strove with revolutionary impetus for a new form of artistic production, a form which abandoned tradition, turning instead to the exclusive use of pictorial means and the creation of an anti-individual, universal pictorial idiom. For Theo van Doesburg - the founder of Concrete Art - the forerunners of the new approach were all artistic styles which, beginning with Impressionism, had emphasised the intrinsic value of the pictorial means as apposed to the real object. He wrote in Fundamental terms of New Art, a treatise begun in 1915, "The artist no longer shapes his idea by means of indirect depiction: symbols, details of nature, genre scenes, etc., but directly, using exclusively the artistic means available".
These ideas find their continuation in the fundamental principles and related commentary on Concrete Art published by the group "art concrete" as a manifesto in Paris in 1930 under van Doesburg's leadership. Here the term "exact" has been replaced by "concrete," and differentiated from "abstract". For van Doesburg, concrete art is the art which refers solely to itself, while abstract art is related to an extra pictorial reality. He expounds on the attributes of the universal idiom in which the concrete artwork is realized. The prerequisite for the artwork is the intellectual design, which is then brought to realization with the appropriate pictorial means and, where necessary, the aid of mathematics and other sciences. Geometric forms are thus not merely a result of pictorial formation but also a pictorial means of illustrating so-called intellectual processes and concepts. The so-called father figures: individual artists such as Josef Albers, Max Bill and Leo Breuer.
On the other hand, even before the II world war, the Swiss artists - spared the drama of political disaster - were able to carry on the development begun by the Bauhaus of 1920s Germany. Max Bill was an indefatigable pioneer whose artistic work went far beyond the boundaries of pure painting. Bill and other artists were members of the "Allianz" group who went down in art history as the 'Zurich Concretes'. Through their activities and those of other artists, Switzerland became a centre of Concrete Art. The French referred to concrete art always as 'Geometric Abstraction'. The non-representational/geometric approaches practiced in Paris branched off into major movements known as Kinetic and Op Art - best known in this field are Jesus-Rafael Soto and Victor Vasarely. Other best known artists who pursued further formation and embranchment of the various problems and questions of Concrete Art in individual countries with characteristic chief representatives such as Ben Nicholson and Bridget Riley for England, Antonio Calderara and Piero Dorazio for Italy and Jan Schoonhoven and Herman de Vries for the Netherlands.
Alongside the developments in Switzerland and France, the various ways in which concrete ideas took shape in Germany with artists like Erich Hauser, Rupprecht Geiger, Thomas Lenk, Adolf Luther and the frequently chancing members of the Duesseldorf group Zero. The core of the group - the artists Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Guenther Uecker concerned themselves primarily with the effects of light, both physical and illusionary and light effects of various colours, an aspect further explored in so-called monochrome painting.
Almost simultaneously with Zero, the Gruppo T formed in Milan in 1959 - their goal being 'to express reality in terms of process'. Related endeavors in the exploration of structures were also being undertaken in America. As emigrants, European artists like Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy and Albers, the former Bauhaus master, found permanent refuge in America. Mondrian's rhythmical colour relationships and Albers' structural constellations as well as his studies on the interaction of colours provided impulses for the specific American versions of non-representational art. Albers taught from 1933 - 1949 in North Carolina and New Haven. Amongst his pupils were various artists such as Eva Hesse, Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg. The American Frank Stella and Frenchman Francois Morellet, had their artistic breakthrough in 1971. Concrete Art is encountered in America as Hard Edge painting, Colour Field painting and Minimal Art.
The pictorial possibilities of the Concrete artists have expanded since 1960s. In 1969 Manfred Mohr began drawing with the help of computer programmes, while topics of natural science played an every greater role in art and questions concerning order and chaos, chance and system came under discussion determining pictorial factors and process. Even conceptual approaches developed into the pictorial world of Concrete Art such as the 'Verticals' by Heinz Gappmayr from Austria.
Photography must be touched on here as well. It made its appearance with such power and intensity that today it forms a whole section, which stands for the spectrum of photographic concepts: from the reduction of structures of the seen world, to serial structures of the kind generated by the lens-less Camera obscura, and finally to the photogramms of geometric forms, made entirely without the aid of a camera. "Can one continually lay new foundations?" was the provocative question posed in 1961 by the painter and co-editor of the magazine The Artwork, Klaus Juergen Fischer. To his mind, art in general and constructive/concrete art in particular had reached a point at which the principle of innovation was proving deceptive to a large extent, especially in view of the fact that the tendency which still advertised itself as new had basically already been developed by the pioneers. In other words, the artist was compelled to ponder the essentials of his work and build upon foundations already laid, but many believed in the further development of Concrete Art.
The term 'Conceptual Art' was intended as a means of achieving new openness. Traditions were no longer to be broken with, as the pioneers had felt compelled to do, but rather a new approach had developed "which consciously recognises the achievements of the previous generation and integrates them into the creative process." To be sure, Concrete Art did not stop at the borders of Europe, and America, but extended its influence to other parts of the world such as South America and Japan as well as Australia and New Zealand. With no tradition of concrete art in Australia and New Zealand, it is remarkable to observe a strong and healthy development in this area since the 60s.
NZ has a unique tradition and engagement with 'abstract painting'. Their history always has been dialogue/dialectic between the construction of the local within the international. NZ's own abstract tradition is exemplified by Gordon Walters. The conceptual art of Australia's pioneers John Nixon and Robert Hunter probably exerted the strongest influence on the younger generation of artists who reveal today a wide and fertile terrain and is enjoying in finding its own definition.
Thus the exhibition comprises a wealth of media and materials, from classical canvas and paper to a range of substances such as plastic sheeting, glass and perspex, wood, metal, spices, wax and finally the employment of computer and photographic techniques. In all cases, the search for diversity of artistic media was accompanied by the quest for the "concrete" moment - a resistance against prevailing fashions, the renunciation of everything popular, although many concrete artworks radiate their own suggestive aesthetic charm.
