Anthony Bond

Anthony Bond was the Director, Curatorial at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1984 to 2013 where he was responsible for the Gallery's collection of international contemporary Art. And this book maps ways of thinking about Art in that period that has guided the formation of the international art collection. The art explored in the book (in the author's words)"is not primarily concerned with the depictions of appearance, but rather with how objects can trigger embodied memory and feeling".
I recall listening to a lecture by Anthony to the Sculpture Association of NSW where he spoke about the piece by Anselm Kiefer.."Glaube hoffnung liebe" .....the one with a lead propellor and he described the issues with both purchasing it and installing it. (It is apparently very heavy apart from other issues). But I also recall his speaking of visiting Kiefer at his studio ...in kind of an industrial wasteland....and musing about the impact of these surroundings as well as German history on Kiefer's work.
Bond suggests that a range of ideas have influenced thinking about art in the period since Duchamp.....and he places Duchamp (even from his work in the 1940's) as being the harbinger of changes in the way that art is now being considered). He talks at length about Duchamp's; "The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. (The large glass"). .....Sounds pretty raunchy....though I've struggled myself to find the raunchiness or eroticism.
Bond suggests that a lot of factors interplay in the idea of contemporary art. These include:
-Metaphor.
-The involvement of the viewer in the art...sometimes as participants in performance art.
-Horizons....boundaries between consciousness and its material origin. (Bond talks of our brain accommodating two selves: the one who looks out on the world objectively and the self who is one with the body and its environment and exists prior to consciousness. He claims that art allows these two selves to be present simultaneously ....connected by the art object and the ideas that come with it.....not sure I am convinced by this two-selves...I think Karl Popper's ideas about World 1 (physical objective), World 2 (cognitive, subjective worlds that we sense and interpret), and World 3 (human concepts creations) might be a more useful way of interpreting the interplay between minds and art). He suggests that art that induces affects and associations .... engages more readily with the unconscious mind. I really have no argument with this.
-The void ...as a metaphor for a point of contact between being and nothingness. (Also as a sexual metaphor)
-He talks about transcendence ...though seems rather unclear what this really means for him. He suggests that modernist artists hoped to make art that, somehow, participated in the real...and Duchamps "ready mades" and his use of the trace of the real are high points in this trajectory".
-Traces are traces of the real (such as the shoes of the disappeared in Colombia) that trigger personal and cultural memories.....Beuys and Klein are used as examples of this movement...especially with sculpture and installation.
Bond seems to get a bit lost in his attempts to describe a large number of works ....most of which seem to stray from his chapter headings. (For example, landscape art under the heading "traces".....Using the land itself is hardly a "trace".
He has a chapter on art that embodies memories but it seems to basically be the same idea of traces as discussed above. (He even uses the same example of the shoes of the disappeared) "Atrabilarios"). And, under this section he talks about the use of the human body in many works ...though doesn't seem able to connect it with his overall theme ....other than some works are more like traces of the human body....and some actually involve the body in performance art.
-Conceptual art...which seems to involve both text ...or words rather than material objects. But it seems that conceptual art and conceptualism have come to embrace everything from textual investigation into the nature of art to various art forms that evolved about the same time, such as land art, performance and body art. But, Bond suggests, there is no point trying to define conceptual art). Others (Ian Burn) have suggested that conceptual art should produce change...a political and social function. Bond suggests that the core of conceptualism is where the idea has primacy over the object and exists independently of it.
I found the book interesting but hard to follow. Bond seems to lose his way between setting out clear concepts about the idea of art and his descriptions and analyses of individual art works. Many of these works don't obviously fit into his framework. it would be a far stronger book if he stuck to his framework ..and maybe extended his framework.
I remember once participating in a dinner party which involved art academics, and an art curator (ex State Art Gallery and now working with a major private gallery) and Australia Council for the Arts rep and I asked: "Did people buy art because they thought it would increase in value or because they just loved the work"? This information was critical to me because I had the job in Austrade of promoting the exports of Australian Art....and if people bought because they were anticipating an increase in value...that would be the point we would have to emphasise. A polite but intense debate followed ....clearly there was no agreement among these experts who....as I pointed out.....were really the arbiters of what was art in Sydney. Maybe that is not surprising. But it has emphasised to me that "the idea of Art" is a very slippery concept.
Three stars from me. I was hoping for better from Anthony Bond.… (mehr)