— Introduction

This exhibition is a survey of the work of Richard Dunn to celebrate the forthcoming monograph, Richard Dunn: Thinking Pictures published by Kerber Verlag, Berlin.

Necessitated by the space limitations of our gallery, this is a highly selected exhibition. Still, it represents significant areas of focus for the artist over some six decades including photo works, non-representational abstraction and photo-derived image paintings.

Concurrently, the artist’s exploration of land and Country is exhibited at the Sofitel Hotel in Collins Street, Melbourne, Richard Dunn - After Namatjira: Blasted Geometries.

We have included below Richard Dunn’s foreword from the monograph. Whilst not written for this exhibition, it provides accessible insights into his approach to making art. Preceding the lavish illustrations in the publication, his thoughtful text is but one of a series of informative and enlightening essays by international experts addressing the artist’s oeuvre in the context of contemporary art.

Copies of Richard Dunn: Thinking Pictures will be available for purchase through the gallery.

Please click here to pre order a copy ($145)

Foreword to the artist’s monograph Richard Dunn: Thinking Pictures, published by Kerber Verlag, Berlin, 2023

FOREWORD: PICTURES AND SHADOWS

RICHARD DUNN

Assembling these images—of paintings, photo-works, objects, and installations—I see the influence of the studio, with its disorder and space, music and silence. Here is my account of what arose in this place, from the coincidence of speculation and action. This is the idea of praxis, focussed on the activity itself. For me, making art is a method of externalising my thoughts, picturing being in the world. This is my response to its social, economic, environmental and political dimensions, as well as the respite of contemplative mental processes and vision itself.

My thoughts can fill this space. And the way I can explore memories, events and experiences is an important motivation. Art making is intuitive. It’s like thinking aloud, where the complexity of experiences can be reflected on in a way that may also resonate in others. So, art is also a social act. Although I propose specific situations, images, and configurations within my view, I manifest the profusion of thought, not the confines of an idea. To this end I take from existing images and abstract formulations, or spatial arrangements, or non-visual sources such as pieces of writing, music, the character or social life of disparate places to reveal or create new meanings.

In life, by choice and circumstance, we deal with the impact of a multiplicity of experiences. Art is similarly made up as one lives but at the same time responds to very different conditions. Donald Judd characterises this difference rather neatly: ‘Art’, he says ‘must be as decisive as acts in life, hopefully more so, and is made despite the same acknowledged ignorance. But the assertions of art depend on more organization and attention than is usual in living’.1

I explore images metaphorically, stimulating reflection. Where one thing is placed in conjunction with another, I’m interested in how this changes the way we understand both. My inclination is to find surprise in this. If there is the temptation of repetition, my tendency is to approach a familiar idea from an unfamiliar position. I have since realised, this aligns with the fragmented formations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. It is a way of thinking and a form of language, this thinking in fragments. To go further, you could say we live in a vortex of fragments. But being wholly visual, art carries the potential for interpretation and connections in very different ways, such as in the example of film montage or collage techniques.

The works shown in this book reveal my curiosity to find new stimulations; to challenge myself, to find out what thoughts look like and to understand things differently. This reminds me of something Ernst Gombrich said in 1969 that has stayed with me; that art history is a history of action and reaction.2 This accounts for new art flouting conventions, or at least taking a wholly new direction. Gombrich meant within art, I mean to extend that idea to the way art engages with the world.

Even so, there are clear threads running throughout my practice and longstanding themes that allow me to retrace my steps, or reconsider what has been made. Rather than seeing what I produce as simply a collection of distinct artworks, they are, in my view, a multifaceted ‘total artwork’.

I studied architecture (and briefly painting and sculpture) in Australia in the1960s, significantly influenced by Louis Kahn, but also very affected by the politics of the termination of Jørn Utzon as Sydney Opera House architect in 1966. I am the author, with the architect Douglas Gordon, of one house. At the same time, I made paintings, exhibiting mostly informal abstracts. Major influences on my openness to art in other forms were my experience with contemporary theatre through a university dramatic society (Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Brecht) and New Wave cinema (in particular, Godard, Truffaut and Varda). Together, these experiences, and pop’s opening up of the image, had a cumulative impact on later work.

Although commencing in Australia, my artistic maturity began in Europe in the second half of the 1960s—my coming up for air—specifically in London and more peripherally in Paris and New York. My understanding expanded. Informed by disruptive art at the boundary of visual art practice after modernism: minimalism, or better ‘reductive’ art, the beginnings of conceptualism, or the situationists, all of which had a connection with work made earlier in the twentieth century: suprematism (Malevich, El Lissitzky, Popova and Rozanova), neoplasticism (Mondrian), abstract expressionism (Pollock and Newman), pop (Hamilton and Rosenquist) and dada (Duchamp). Each challenged the status and reception of artworks. Let’s not underestimate the impact of new music, architecture and its spatial sense, the use of mathematics or just numbers, even the disruptive nature of contemporary art, such as Land Art and Fluxus.

Each place where I have lived or spent extended time has given me something quite precise. London early on was where I discovered how to think, then the positivity of New York suggested that anything is possible and art comes from a context, while Paris bore the weight of its context––and the complexities of life became clear. Scotland reveals the weight of the imperial centre and that the enlightenment is in the present tense, while in India it is the functionality of chaos, the alignment of order and disorder, and the cultural power of textiles that are evident. In Germany I understood the uncertain but significant meaning of ‘consequence’. Australia? Understanding it is a work in progress.

This book commences towards the completion of my life-changing three years at the Royal College of Art, culminating in 1969 in large-scale non-representational paintings and a thesis on minimalism, not as non-objective art, but influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud’s insights. Things can mean more than appearances suggest. I embarked on a process of personal discovery, seeking not a group to join, nor idioms to embrace, but a form of art in which I pursued ‘meaning’ on my own terms.

The Freudian philosopher Richard Wollheim, who gave the name ‘minimalism’ to the reductive tendency of twentieth century art, presciently linked minimalism, pop and conceptual art by bracketing Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg and Marcel Duchamp, opening art beyond style or art movements.3 This opened contemporary art beyond categories.

In the late 1960s, when I was faced with the increasingly reductive and broken trajectory of twentieth century modernism, ‘the death of painting’ or the rediscovery of the monochrome, I was not tempted to retreat into past solutions. This period was a fertile beginning point, as it was for other contemporary artists who emerged at that time, particularly in Germany.

At that brief moment I could have been described as a kind of ‘minimalist’, yet that is as inaccurate as calling me ‘postmodern’ fifteen years later. Rather than some variant on ‘conceptual artist’, this book shows all my work as driven by internal thinking processes rather than visual models; ‘idea art’ you could say, where thinking is made concrete, externalised, but with an aesthetic character.

Blurred boundaries between different tendencies, as Wollheim perceived, or, to deliberately change direction, as Gombrich understood, extend the possibilities of what I do. This requires an embrace of complexity over the implied simplicity of minimalism, to be realised more like questions than answers.

Outside defined boundaries and canonical practices a new kind of practice became possible. One that is optimistic, heterogeneous and at odds with the certainties of the style consistency that establishes brand recognition or commodification. My interest was, and remains, more intimate; in the process of making art I seek to understand something of the world we inhabit, my place in it, and at the same time to give space to a spectator to reflect on their own perceptions. I direct my thinking in a particular way. A spectator can do the same. In a sense they can occupy the space of the artist. As Marcel Duchamp put it, ‘The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds their contribution to the creative act.’4

You will see that to map my practice is to discover an underlying framework; a planar base of abstract/reflective painting with dispersed features referencing images, often derived from the flattened, abstract nature of a photograph. Images that are themselves referents rather than literal representations, as analogies, point in a certain direction rather than behave as representations. This has been a consistent way of working for over fifty years, a way of working that embraces themes and references not easily accommodated in painting alone. In my work the spectator meets the artwork in a shared space and in a relationship that is as much corporeal as visual.

Richard Dunn

1 Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (eds.), Donald Judd Writings (New York: Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).

2 From a talk given for the Royal College of Art at the Imperial College, London.

3 Richard Wollheim, ‘Minimal Art’, Arts Magazine (January 1965).

4 Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, (London, 1975), pp. 138-140). This was from a talk given in Houston in 1957.

Please click here to pre order a copy of Richard Dunn: Thinking Pictures ($145)