tom-isaacs

[tom-isaacs]

Medal For All Battles - Elwyn Lynn

"Elwyn Lynn was a pioneering exponent of collage art in Australia and is best known for his 'matter paintings' in which he built up heavily textured surfaces. The work depicts a large central cross, in black ink, upon which the names of individual battles, places and theatres of war from across the world, in both historic and contemporary times, are written. A gold military cross is pinned to the left arm of the cross and the right arm is sliced and damaged at the bottom corner, with a photograph of a landscape with a tree inserted. The cruciform shape and colour black are symbolic of sacrifice and lost life. This work places events in Australian military history (particularly Gallipoli, Tobruk and Kokoda) , which have been claimed as defining moments in the shaping of our nation's identity within the broader context of world conflict and draws parallels between the shaping of destiny for other that war has had. The collage is not celebratory but mournful and speaks of the universality of war, violence and death in moulding humanity in the past, present and future."

[tom-isaacs]



Set design for the opera Victory over the Sun - Kazimir Malevich

[tom-isaacs]

Citizenship for Pure Sense of Kazimierz Malewicz - Zbigniew Warpechowsk & Natalia LL

"In a room, against a white screen, a black square was hanged. The artist lay on the floor under a duvet with a 30x30cm hole in it. Natalia LL was hitting Warpechowski with a specially-made whip in such a fashion that a bloody red trace in the shape of a square was left on his back where there was the whole in the duvet."

[tom-isaacs]

Son - Zbigniew Warpechowski

"The ten-year-old son of the artist, Samuel, took part in the performance. The central idea of the action was to answer the question: To what extent is a child an individual who naturally 'creates himself', and to what extent is he 'created' by his parents and the environment? "In the first part of the event the child freely changed the position of his body, but with time he was encouraged more and more to do so by the command come up with something else. "In the second part the artist interviewed his son, asking him such basic questions as, for example, 'who is a man?', 'what is art?'"

[tom-isaacs]

 Anselm Kiefer, Aurora, 2017

[tom-isaacs]

Untitled (Burning House) - David Wojnarowicz

[tom-isaacs]

Untitled (Graves) – Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger

[tom-isaacs]

Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays, 1978-1982

[tom-isaacs]

Fantasy Disorder (Isle of the Little Death) - Lionel Bawden

[tom-isaacs]

Untitled - Robert Morris

[tom-isaacs]

Telepathy - Joyce Hinterding & David Haines

“Telepathy (2008) was an installation commission by the collaborative team of David Haines and Joyce Hinterding. The commissioning process was initiated by Performance Space’s former Associate Director, Sally Breen, as part of a suite of new works by NSW-based artists, made specifically for the cavernous CarriageWorks environment and in relation to its history, former uses and present-day conversion. Haines and Hinterding responded to the visually layered, light-filled, busy and echoic building by considering a space for darkness, silence and solitude: an anechoic chamber. Though it is located at a nexus for Sydney’s railway network, surrounded by vibrations, speed and electricity, Telepathy is an environment created for the purpose of channelling energy inwardly, for slowing down and shutting out all other sounds aside from the voice and the mind of the self. It is a space for the individual, sheltered within a reverberant environment and a dazzling, high-chroma, monolithic object that houses a non-objective purpose and potential for experience.” (source)

[tom-isaacs]

The Cave, The Flood - Leslie Eastman

[tom-isaacs]

Aktion im Moor - Joseph Beuys

"On that day in ‘71, almost as warm astoday, the artist Joseph Beuys, together with his artistic friends/photographers Ute Klophaus and Gianfranco Gorgoni, drives along the Meijelseweg in the direction of Eindhoven, where he has his exhibition at the Van Abbe-museum of contemporary art. Whether he comes from home – Düsseldorf – or from a guesthouse – Nederweert – we don’t know. Fact is that the three friends pass the Groote Peel and that Beuys is very interested in this swamp. "According to the artist, a swamp is the primal soup of life. "Just beyond the provincial border between Meijel and Asten on the left side of the road, photographer Gorgoni discovers the concrete bunker from the war in the barren Peellandscape between the peat pits. "Beuys is immediately enthusiastic. The bunker reminds him of the war experiences that marked his life. The artist puts his Volkswagen on the side of the road and with Gorgoni he dives in de Peel for a closer inspection. "A bird flutters terrified and Beuys gets inpiration. He too flutters into the swamp. As both men get closer to the casemate, it gets swampier. Beuys has to jump from lawn to lawn in order not to go under prematurely. "It’s at the bunker that Beuys gets his artistic peak. The casemate was once built in an atmosphere of threat of war. The artist, ex-Luftwaffe, put his face against the warm casemate wall, arms outstretched. But why exactly? Is it an embrace? Or does Beuys depict the suffering of the crucified? Art criticism later chose the crucified Christ. ‘Wiedergutmachung’, they say. "But still there is this Peelpond. That black swamp, that uterus of earthly life. "What would it be like to go back in there? Beuys dips his hands and arms into the mud, smears it all over himself, drops flat in it and stretches his arms. Above him floats his inseparable felt hat. "Gorgoni takes pictures of all those actions. Click-click-click-click. "How many exactly and how they follow one another cannot be said with certainty. What can be said, however, is that in the internet age there are about seven digitally retrievable pictures. ... "After the catharsis, Beuys sops with the photographer back to the car, where Ute Klophaus is waiting. "Soaking wet he continues his journey to the Van Abbe in Eindhoven, where director Jean Leering is standing in the doorway and anxiously informs what happened. "'Nothing special. Or may be it is. We stopped for the creation of new work. An Aktion im Moor.'" (source)

[tom-isaacs]

4000 A.D. When science and art are entirely melted together to something new When the people will have lost their remembrance and thus will have no past, only future. When they will have to discover everything every moment again and again When they will have lost their need for contact with others … Then they will live in a world of only colour, light, space, time, sounds and movement Then colour light space time sounds and movement will be free No music No theatre No art No There will be sound Colour Light Space Time Movement’

Stanley Brouwn, quoted in ‘In Search of Stanley Brouwn’ by Oscar van den Boogaard

[tom-isaacs]

Malevich’s ‘arkhitekton coffin’ designed by Nikolai Suetin and Konstantin Rozhdestvensky

“Suetin and Rozhdestvensky together drew a design for the coffin and took it to a carpenter's workshop, where the carpenter simplified the project a little, because he could not make all the complex Suprematist profiles. The coffin was a" fallen sideways " Architecton, smooth on all sides. Each side of the coffin had six ledges: three ledges on the lid and three on the coffin. Suetin and Rozhdestvensky painted this coffin: the side of the coffin and the lids adjacent to the sides were green, the upper sides of the second ledge of the lid were black, and the rest was all white; on the upper white side, a black square was drawn at the heads, and a red circle was drawn at the feet. They did not draw the cross, so as not to show unambiguously religious symbols.” (source)

[tom-isaacs]

About Two Squares, El Lissitzky

To children, to all children

Don’t read. Take paper. Columns. Blocks. Fold. Color. Build. There are two squares.

Flying toward earth from afar and

What they see. A black chaos.

Crash! Things scattered everywhere.

And, on the black, the red settled firmly.

Here it ended. Continued.

UNOVIS. Constructed 1920 Vitebsk.

[tom-isaacs]

Four Squares - Kazimir Malevich

Found image.