Exhibitions
Auckland
TIM GARRITY
JOHN TARLTON Drawings
In a manner of speaking, Tarlton's drawings give us the facts of life - the up-dated components of the daily life scenes that the Impressionists and other schools have celebrated in the past by quite opposite means. The objects depicted, a small range compared to the infinite one at hand, are all things which are physically as close to us as anything can be; and to ask the purpose of portraying them at all, in so meticulous a style, comes close to asking what the meaning of life at the day-to-day level is. A video artist might well have chosen the processes involved in the use of these things, instead of the things themselves: not the shirt, but the slow unacknowledged ritual of dressing, not a tea-pot but the ceremony, and so on.
The use people have made of their intense experiences of Being, either their own or that of things, or both, as a clue to the ultimate meaning of what for want of a better term we call life, has had a long history. Herman Hesse put it well when he said: 'Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them'. The ceremony of seeing is as profound as we choose to make it. Tarlton is an extremist. As a foundation for his most cherished beliefs, or as a cover-up for the lack of them, Western man has a predeliction for elaborately baroque patterns of thought and decorative flights of esoteric fantasy which can be as time-consuming as they are self-defeatingly complex. On the other hand, to base one's life and/or art just as successfully, as Tarlton does, on short bursts of cognitive experience at the domestic level, is, in the opinion of many, almost like cheating, an inexcusable spiritual short-circuit - not cricket.
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JOHN TARLTON Swimming Togs charcoal (Barry Lett Galleries) |
There is a simple freshness about these drawings which ventilates an art world where deep significances tend to be worn perhaps a trifle too heavily on the sleeve, often to no great effect. What Tarlton appears to be saying, in effect, over and above the basic elegance of his linear gesture, is, firstly, that 'things' matter - they matter one hell of a lot; and secondly, that 'meaning', considered as a nomadic quality loose in the world, is evenly dispersed, democratically as it were, right across the board from the so-called sublime to the so-called ridiculous. The French poets pointed this out at the turn of the century, that art, to be successful, need not resort to special subject-matter and clichés. Fish and chips are as much a part of English culture as the Articles of the Anglican Church. William Blake was no Tarlton: but he did manage to find acute meanings at the same molecular level - in a sand grain, which, incidentally, at a much later date, the art teacher Kepes, put under the microscope and called the 'New Landscape', though perhaps, if the truth were known, he was really more interested in microscopes than sand.
Tarlton's finely draughted images are isolated on the two-dimensional paper space in much the same way that free-standing sculpture is, in three-dimensional space. One can imagine the paper extending infinitely in all directions around the image. But because at the same time the images are carefully placed within the four edges of the paper, ambiguities are produced in which the finite and the infinite space fluctuate like figure and ground. And because there are no shadows cast, the paper does treble-duty: as space, as diffused light source and as a physical support for graphite.
The exhibition was prefaced by a framed semi-conceptual piece consisting of an enlarged typescript of the famous motto of Ingres: 'Drawing is the probity of art', followed by a vertical arrangement of these six words plus the author's name, each followed by the dictionary definition. By this, a mood is established and the pictures follow on as a sort of horizontal array of visual definitions. But since the objects depicted are all well eroded by time and use, a rich cluster of subjective associations emerge which are too strong for the decorum of Tarlton's objective technique to contain. Here again are figure-and-ground fluctuations, this time between the objective and the subjective.
An early pioneer in modern art, Duchamp, or was it Ernst, reported being tickled pink by the sight of surreal relativities set up by the shock juxtapositioning of an umbrella on an operating table. It is as though Tarlton has omitted the table but allowed the viewer's attitudes and prejudices to take its place as the umbrella's incongruous partner. If the effect is still seen as surreal, then it probably means that the viewer is totally estranged from the artifacts and tools of daily living, which is a strange situation to be in, probably unique in the history of man.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 5 April/May 1977