Taking erotic back to the temple
Godwin Bradbeer, Man of Errors
One of Godwin Bradbeer’s achievements is to have taken sex out of the tawdry fairground to which modern pop culture had consigned it, and to have defiantly restored it to the temple. In other words, Bradbeer gives back to sexuality the sense of mysterious, sacred beauty it had for the late Romantics, complete with the sense of melancholy reflection that that implies, yet with little hint of the sentimentality and idealism that clouded the 19th-century vision.
But these drawings are traditional, not so much in the sense that they try to revive the art of the past or to express some kind of homage to it (although there are elements of both), but in the more fruitful sense that they carry on a constructive dialogue with history. They are antithesis to the Academy’s thesis. Yet the resulting synthesis is fragile.
It’s as if Bradbeer is constantly having to bring into check his natural propensity for voluptuousness. He makes a point of always seeing through things, even in the purely physical sense of seeing through the human body to the skeleton beneath, thus undermining any easy identification with physical beauty and foiling the scent of narcissism that might otherwise overwhelm everything.
But, despite these hints of mannerism, and although it might seem strangely anachronistic to say so, Godwin Bradbeer’s drawings undoubtedly carry moral authority, in a way that very few contemporary works do.
Peter Timms, The Age, Thu, 27 Aug 1998
Man in the Cold
Working beyond ‘the end of art’
This is the so-called abstract art. The position which religion then took is now taken by art.
For the sake of progress we must suppress the notion of ‘art’ as an aesthetic speculation.
These statements made in 1925 by the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg informed some of the central foundations of Modernism.
How does one work within the seemingly anachronistic and conventional idiom of figuration, representing the human form, and yet address the significance of the ‘abstract field’, an essential space of authority and clarity. How does one progress with the knowledge that the antithesis of what one might explore is most valid, without risking ambivalence and uncertainty?…The anxiety of the man in the cold.
… ‘Classical humanism holds to ideas related to an eternal and unchangeable perception of human nature. Bradbeers work is not amenable to transgression and to breaking with long held conceptions of the constancy of humanism. However while these drawings are located in a space that reflects the sensory fabric of human existence, they also suggest a frail uncertain and perhaps fraught position. From our current perspective Bradbeers drawings may have been made as reparations across a modernist rupture.
Peter Westwood
An artist, writer and curator based in Melbourne.
The Vessel of the Self
In 1999, Godwin Bradbeer told Mark Pennings - ‘I am committed to the human figure - that where my loyalty lies’. Bradbeer’s concern for the body is not for its academic anatomy but for what he calls ‘subcutaneous order’ - existential, occasionally lightened by subtle erotic promise, often tormented, always mysterious.
Bradbeer respectfully offers the body as a vessel of the self but of a self that he must transcend. To engage with transubstantiating the flesh into a drawing is to testify to human possibility for ‘catastrophe and exhilaration’. His work in various media, yields an art of nuances echo and hommages where manipulated photographs may look like drawings and drawings may look like solarisations. There works defy figuration: they are mediative, contemplative, often dark, isolated, self possessed, pre-occupied with subtle, non-naturalistic hues and tones.
And, yes, the maturing self is growing up and growing up is sometimes egotistical. These photographs are indeed portraits of the artist and a young man. Bradbeer mugs for the camera, posturing and modelling emotions that transcend the everyday self. As well as manipulating his own body in front of the camera, he manipulates the images in the processing. Dissecting these nudes would reveal not muscles, tendons or bones but the nerve impulses, humours and mesmeric fluids that comprise the spirituality that perfumes all his work. The self of these photographs in more naive, more transparent than is his more recent work but the sacral impulse is clearly evident.
Beatrice Faust, May 2000
Godwin Bradbeer’s drawing, Man in Squared Space, (2007) is a key image in this new exhibition of his work titled Soliloquy. Part of the artist’s sustained investigation of the human figure, this work is one of a several images of the head and shoulders of a man seen slightly from above, immobile and alone within a large pictorial world of white geometricised space. As with his oeuvre in general, the exhibition itself consists largely of solitary figures. The word ‘soliloquy’ is defined as the act of conversing with the self and it is derived from two Latin words, solus meaning alone and loqui meaning to speak. It seems that the solitary self and the interior monologue have informed the work of Bradbeer almost from the beginning of what has been a long and impressive career. In the art of Bradbeer, the vehicle for the self is most often the human form. As the artist tells us: ‘In becoming a figurative artist I really chose the vessel of the self . . . I am committed to the human figure – that’s where my loyalty lies.’1 But the human body, he says, is simply the metaphor he works with. 2
A virtuoso draftsman who has won most of the major drawing prizes on offer in this country, including the Dobell Prize in 1998, Bradbeer has a profound understanding of human anatomy and he also teaches drawing from the human body. However his own images of the body are not derived from a model or from photographs; rather they are products cultivated from memory and imagination. As he says: ‘In order for the body to be symbolic or ideal it can’t become too descriptive.’3 Of Man in Squared Space he has said ‘the image is an abstraction of a man … a composite of men.’4 Similarly, the space the man occupies has no relationship to any observed reality. It may be a room or the page of a book, or it may be as literal and formal as the sheet of paper on which it appears....
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Dr Rose Stone, Art Historian, March 2008
Man in Squared Space
The work presented at Ardel Gallery in the exhibition ‘Portraits in Exile’ shows recent drawings made upon figurative themes that have been constant - in various manifestations - in my art since my youth.
In its origins my drawing has aspects of a rigorous realism but the disengagement from the description of specific identity and the distractions of narrative and context suggests work that is becoming a meditation on ‘being’. This aspect of displacement and divorce from context positions me, or at least my singular subject, within its solitary formal confinement, in exile.
A deep love for the classical art of several cultures has shaped this imagery. Given that classical art is often encountered as damaged fragment - frequently desecrated and dislocated from origin and meaning – for me intensifies in particular ways its intrinsic beauty and nobility of design.
Central to this exhibition are several recent works under the thematic title; ‘Imago’ these drawings continue my preoccupation with the frontal gazing face of an anonymous person, ambiguous in its description in terms of sex, race, age and character. Though they risk the possibility of blandness and banality these works endeavour a poignant universality without the loss of the exoticism that is the mystery of each individual...
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G. Bradbeer, January 2009
Portraits in Exile
Conceptual drawing in Australia from 1970 – 2000s can be seen to preoccupy itself with image and meaning, and to marginalise qualities of touch and tactility that previously differentiated drawing from other works on paper. Much of the large-scale drawing made in the 1980s has been identified as having a sense of detachment. Art critic Robert Hughes argued that large scale drawing suffered because of its removal from the preconditions of its making, the processes of drawing, and also a separation from that which critic Tony Godfrey offered as a summary of the purpose of drawing: as a form of “archaeology of touch”.1 During the last thirty years, the intimacy of drawing has at times become overwhelmed by “the mural” and the predominance of conceptualism; leaving wall-sized, wall paper.
Seeing art work reproduced in a catalogue is not the experience of seeing the work itself. A major Australian drawer such as Godwin Bradbeer, whose vast, dark field drawings such as Imitation of Shadow 1989 are larger than human scale, suffers in reproduction because his images are reduced to the size of postage-stamp simulacra. Here the qualities of layered surface; charcoal, chinagraph and pastel are reduced. The dynamics of the image and its meaning, as funnelled through photographic reproduction, is dissipated. It is a negation not merely of intimacy but of the domain of touch that drawing traditionally, and still contemporaneously, should occupy. “Image-making” does not necessarily equate with “drawing” at all; it is only part of its rationale.
…Arthur McIntyre referred to Bradbeers drawings since the 1980’s as having ‘…placed him in the Neo Figurative camp which owes no small debt to Italian Trans Avant-garde preoccupations with reinterpretations of past history and its motifs’ Animism with a series of man and horse drawings, notably Phalanx Tertia 1985, convey an undercurrent of sexual metaphor that lurks with most of his work. Around the same time, John Elderfeld, then Curator of Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, stated that; “ The oft titled ‘new drawing’ refers to ‘imagist drawing’ This is more to the point. Bradbeer was unabashedly imagist, and often mistakenly viewed as being anachronistic in intent. I consider his interest in history to be one of continuance more than reinterpretation.
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Dr Neill Overton, June 2006
From the Shadows
Godwin Bradbeer in conversation with Irene Barberis
I.B. You have manipulated these drawings through the medium of ‘light’, was this your purpose?
The reference point within my most sustained images is the seul point de lumiere. The dominant point of light from which all others are keyed with descending intensity. In most of my drawings I set up a constellation of points of light, a stellar geometry within the physiognomy. Within a squared gallery space I like to consider the four walls with a consciousness of their north, south, east and westerley aspects. Had I used the four walls there would be a considered rapport –perhaps cultural - between the eight (four diptych) visages. Only one face in duality is used here.
I.B. I first met you through my practice of classical dance – was the inclusion of the swan and its reflection a reference to the ballet Swan Lake?
The swan has many associations of course in art and mythology. It is perhaps opportunistic of me to take advantage of such a motif but in my art I eventually visit all the cliches. ‘Swan of Trespass’ acknowledges the extraordinary surrealist Ern Malley poem ‘Durer: Innsbruck, 1495’ which contains that phrase; ‘black swan of trespass.’ Somewhat quaintly for me too it also nostalgically and obscurely recalls the inverted black swan of Western Australia. As a childhood hobbyist I knew this pre Federation postage stamp to be black and white, flawed, absurd, extremely rare, very valuable and modestly beautiful...
Dr Irene Barberis and G. Bradbeer, April 2007
Lux in Tenebris Lucet
Light Shines in Darkness
‘I’m a monkey mmmmman’
Monkey Man by Mick Jagger/Keith Richards
Point finale is the full stop in French punctuation, as in English, it is visually described by a dot. It is the final stop to a passage of text.
The images that are scattered throughout the stairwell of the Drawing Space in Building 49 at RMIT under the title Point Finale are comprised of dots, dots of domestic dust and pastel dust swept from the floors of my studios, these drawings are transient, they will wash easily off the walls.
In the mid 1980s when I began doing images of reflective duality – like a Narcissus or a Swan – I developed the habit of tracing the original freehand drawing and transferring it in reverse to a secondary drawing. The process I used called spolvero, was commonplace amongst fresco and mural painters who punctured holes along the outlines of a cartoon drawing in order to powder silhouettes and details onto a section of wall. I have memories from school of my geography teacher using this process with chalk dust to transfer complex maps of the world to the blackboard.
I now have many tracings and considered these as a ready made work for installation when given this opportunity. In the early 1990s I had painted 100 monkeys on 100 canvases for another project, these were titled anima sola and they presented our most familiar sibling creature, the monkey, with its similar physiology, cavorting, crawling and cowering in oblivious two dimensional oblivion.
Although few of these had previously been duplicated they nevertheless became the model for another dozen designs of the diminutive self, mocked by its own curling tail, furling and unfurling like a party whistle or hovering like a question mark above itself.
After placing an initial dozen monkeys I surrendered the tracings and invited my assistant students to concoct whatever choreographies they wished from this troop of the absurd.
One image is an exception to the theatre of monkeys. This is the 3 metre dotted figure of a human male figure in vertical headlong fall, a variation from the version of 1981. There are many reasons why a figurative and melancholic artist like myself might be drawn toward the monkey image or the spectacle of fall. Breaking my neck by fall in the folly of my youth is now a remote reference for the latter. For the former I would cite the final scene from Werner Herzogs’ Aguirre Wrath of God. In this extraordinary film Klaus Kinski as the armoured conquistador is overrun by scampering monkeys on his scuttled raft amid the corpses of his men and the indifference of the vast jungle and the great Amazon River. Nobility and ignobility are perversely reversed in this absurd finale that appears to position aspects of evolutionary genealogy in confused and irreverent order.
In the early nineties when I developed the initial suite of the anima sola monkey images, my intention (partly fulfilled) was to present them in two large triangular wall installations so that in pyramidal formation they represented an evolutionary genealogy or tree of man and in the second presentation as upturned triangular assembly they formed an institutional hierarchy like a feudal pyramid with serfs below and monarch above, though without any distinguishing features of status. The vertical passage of the stairwell of the Drawing Space with its facility for ascension and descension, is a site compatible with these intentions. Nevertheless, despite the gravitas, this is a playful installation of a quite subtle graffiti.
RMIT University
G. Bradbeer
October – December 2008