Peter Neilson

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ONE STEP AHEAD Peter Neilson

2:30pm Sun. June 26th

And having read Adorno's position that art's impulse is to objectivate the fleeting, not the permanent may well run through the whole of its history;
And, bowing low before Benjamin's final reading of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus as the 'angel of history' blown backwards into the future by a storm form Paradise while the chain of events we call progress is seen by our angel as one single catastrophe which piles up wreckage and hurls it at the angel's feet;
And after musing on the 'missing link' that so intrigued Greenberg into his old age, between Picasso's Rose Period and Braque's Fauvist period and the 'unimaginable, solely intuitive leap into Cubism (my own take being that conversations between Picasso and Gertrude Stein in 1905 during her daily sittings over three months for his famous portrait of her, was Picasso's introduction to her ideas the art's new role in the twentieth century was to express a 'continuous present' which led directly tothe Cubist re-viewing of the visual suject: instantly, from all sides, all at once - a 'continuous present').

And after disagreeing with John Updike's savaging of the sainted, satanic Pollack's Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952, 'with its unhappy discovery of orange paint', as a regression of style, painted years after Pollack had moved on from his 'drip-paint' style, and Updike's rejoicing in its banishment to an empire outpost in Australia 'whence it will come but rarely' to trouble those populating the centre of the universe,it was but a small step through the labyrinth of my library to re-read Sherman E. Lee's history of China's Southern Sung landscape style (1127-1277AD),painted by practitioner's of the 'Sponaneous mode" with its extremely bold 'flung ink' techniques revealing 'abrupt and arbirary personality' , and a'pictorial parallel to the mystic's enlightenment, as well as to the individual's revolt against the times of troubles that were the last days of the Dynasty';

And after reading the film critic Parker Tyler's early review of Pollack's art, written in March 1950, explaining that Pollack's 'labyrinths' were visual metaphors which 'even the most unprepared spectator would immediately grasp', inferring that it existed as a widely recognised visual metaphor before it was adopted by Pollack and that film noir was lasgely responsible for the labyrinth's dissemination thoughout post-WW2 visual culture;

Then, and only then, do I clear my mind of theories and worthy ideas, take up my brush and canvas, which stare back at me across eight hundred years of raging history, and and in the gathering silence listen to Aragon the Young and Rimbaud the Even Younger, for directions, seeking a way through the 'calculated confusion', on the unmarked map tp Nowhere Known.

At last, painting is out of the spotlight, old, and tired of carrying the avant-garde can for every philosophical statement imaginable and pleased to hand that part of life over to the re-producables', allowing itself to be itself at its core: tough, individual, elite; and perhaps for the first time able to say something about what's going on in the spotlight. Painting continues outrunning history - one fleeting step ahead.

This statement by Peter Neilson was first published in the invitation to his July 2006 exhibition of paintings and drawings by Australian Galleries, at Dank Street Gallery, Waterloo, Sydney Australia. ...

I SAY...

7:45pm Mon. May 2nd

Contest the whole, because, as Adorno writes, 'the whole is false'.

And. again, as Adorno writes: "...the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar".

And again:"...Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you".

...and again: "In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew. While the individual, like all individualistic processes of production, has fallen behind the state of technology and become historically obsolete, he becomes the custodian of truth, as the condemned against the victor. For the individual alone preserves, in however distorted a form, a trace of that which legitimizes all technification and yet to which the latter blinds itself. Because unbridled progress exhibits no immediate identity with that of mankind, its antithesis can give true progress, shelter.
A pencil and rubber are more use to thought than a battalion of assistants".

Peter Neilson, May,2011 ...

WE PAINTERS...

8:17pm Sun. May 1st

...and when it's all been
said and done
It's in our always failing
We discover
That it hasn't all been
said and done.

Peter Neilson 2011 ...

ESSAY BY REX BUTLER, SENIOR LECTURER, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, MEDIA STUDIES AND ART HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

4:37pm Sat. January 5th

The following is an essay which appeared in a folio of Peter Neilson's artwork published for the 2007 Sydney exhibition of Neilson's work at Australian Galleries,15 Roylston Street, PADDINGTON,NSW.

In a typical Peter Neilson painting, there is a series of rooms or spaces, in each of which a different scene or scenario takes place. A man smokes a cigar alone in a bar. A woman in a red evening dress prowls down some stairs. A busker plays a guitar in a railway underpass. The various scenes are linked magically, illogically, across great jumps of scale and perspective. A door opening at the back of one space reveals a much larger interior space. The glass of a picture frame reflects a world that exists nowhere in reality. Curtains part on a stage to reveal the immense night sky. Connecting these spaces are strangely tilted staircases, beams of torchlight cutting through the dark, pencils that point suggestively and confetti that hangs in the air. Through their recessed depths, birds and miniturised helicopters fly. And the whole space of the painting is bathed in a deep aquamarine light, which stains everything it touches.

Of course, the inescapable reference in all this is film noir: lights shining on rain-slicked streets, neon signs,raking shadows,men and women sitting in evening dress in seedy bars, mysterious assignations in hotel lobbies. It is a dream-like haunted world that Neilson constructs, full of half-remembered ghosts and spectres. They are almost (the barfly, the spy the femme fatale) the undead stereotypes of our culture - and Neilson paints them with just enough detail to animate but nor individualise them. We look at his pictures as if separated from them by time and space: the figures in them appear shrunken as though seen from far away and waver and flicker as though about to disappear. They are plainly unreal, existing only within the strict limits of Neilson's artistic universe, like fish swimming in an aquarium.

This was perhaps the great lesson Neilson learnt during his 20-year long absence from painting.If we compare Neilson's works from 1987 to those of his first acclaimed show as a 23 year old in 1967, the only thing that distinguishes them is the addition of a frame. When Neilson speaks of the way that after his first exhibition, he worried about whether he was"using photograghy as a scapegoat for his inability to draw", we would say that this is not just an individual concern but a general cultural attitude towards the continued possibility of figurative painting. And Neilson in response to this, whether conciously or not, came to the same conclusion as arguably the greatest of twentieth-cetury figurative painters, Edward Hopper, which is that it is necessary to add an imaginary frame around or inside the work. It is to admit that what we see in a figurative painting is not real but merely a representation standing in for the real. The frame, in cutting out, or excerpting what we see from reality, precisely allows us to fantasize about it:in a paradoxical way, it is not so much what is outside as what is inside the 'frame' that is seen as though it is missing.

Like Hopper, with Neilson we would note not only the generally cinematic feel of his compositions, but more particularly the series of camera-like framings that run throughout his work. Just like Hopper often viewed his figures through windows(whether actual or implied), so in Neilson we have a whole series of doorways, picture frames and television screens that distinguish the various tableaux played out in his pictures. In this, Neilson doubtless means to emphasise the unreal or even phantasmagorical nature of what he stages. It is their framing more than any actual content that gives them the effect of a kind of dream or fantasy. And yet, somewhat surprisingly, the titles of Neilson's paintings often hint at a kind of social 'reality', or even the possibility of a 'political' reading of the work: 'History rising... to claim us all'(2000),'The dissenter'(2003), Wheels in motion, hearts on fire(the battle outside's still raging)(2004-5). What is going on here? In fact if we look closely at Neilson's paintings, at the back of there fantasmic settings we often have the invocation of some kind of reality. Through their rear windows or outside their balconies, we see a distant city on fire or being blown up by a squadron of helicopters choppering in, a harshly-lit pair of cleaners removing the previous day's rubbish so that a new day can begin again...

Neilson is not doing anything so obvious as contrasting dream and reality here, criticising the irresposibility of day dreams in urging us to pay more attention to life. He very well knows that, if we were to seek to make direct contact with reality like this, we would end up seeing it in the same unreal phantasmic terms as he depicts in his paintings. Rather, in a brilliant kind of 'mousetrap', he is pointing to the fact that it is exactly in dreams that we encounter what must be excluded to allow the dream-like nature of reality. Just as the truth in theatre is not to be revealed immediately but only in the form of a play within a play, so Neilson is saying that the real is not directly to be represented but only by means of the frame within the frame. The real is not outside of the frame but is,on the contrary, indicated by a certain doubling or splitting of the frame. It is that which, in being framed by the painting, ends up framing it. ...