Anton
Hasell is an artist bursting with energy and just the sort of person you can
lob a probing inquiry to and he’ll respond with a firework display of bright
stories, concepts and impassioned pleas. He is the ideal interviewee, or even
companion over coffee. In many ways Anton was an early artistic influence on
me, little to either of our awarenesses. His bells at Birrarung Marr stimulated
and reinforced my own desire to pursue art, as I wandered about the city in the
wee hours of the morning, plagued by insomnia and wrestling with a decision to
return to school at age 30.
I’ve
interviewed Anton previously, in a different context, which you can read here if you’d
like more of insight into Anton and his creations. His current exhibition with
us at Stockroom gave me an excuse to chat again, this time more specifically
about this body of work – ‘Quest to find an inland sea’.
_____
KENT: Hi Anton. For your exhibition with us you have created a form of background
narrative that informs the content of the artworks. So, aside from the material
artworks themselves - the panels, the painting, the laser-cut and constructed
metal tree - there is also a story that you have constructed that accompanies
the exhibition about geography and the reinterpretation of history. Could you
divulge a little bit of that for us?
ANTON: Hi
Kent, Cherry Blossom Tree (Prunus serrulata von mueller) whose discovery along
the shoreline of the inland sea offers a serious challenge to the 'Wallace
line' flora and fauna disjunction theory and the implication that Australia is
part of Gondwanaland, one of the fragments that also includes Africa and Sth
America. If the species Prunus serrulata can be shown to be common from North
Asia to the Australian continent, then clearly, in a geographic sense,
Australia must be understood as an essentially Asian country. Our cultural
future, responding to geography, should be to continue to splice the threads of
an Asian future that is clearly forming before us.
The inland
sea, so long invisible to our European eyes whose vast expanse was amazingly
just missed by every inland explorer other than Leichhardt, saturates the
centre of this country by bringing to the surface the intricate vascular
network of the artesian basin spread out beneath Australia and the Asian
Islands to the north of us. These works on brass and copper panels are
observations I have made from the shores of the inland sea. There are beautiful
islands whose indentations are perfectly scaled in equal tempered array, in
size and distance apart, on whose bank a bell buoy has come to grief. Perhaps
the tolling of its great bell have rutted the topology to musical perfection,
so trace your fingers across its undulation to feel the musicality of a braille
touch. Some land forms are clearly dangerous, and small light towers are
installed to warn off the innocent, though a drifting boat seems to have been
empty of these kind of people. Other island's rolling waves have keep
florescent inflatables beyond their safe harbour. But where birds dash across
the waves, or fish swim into eager beaks, life can shimmer along the edges of
the inland sea. The Cherry Blossom Tree thrives in the marshy tidal
flows, and like clockwork the weather patterns and flocks of birds cycle
through their season.
For those
who know my work, this exhibition is a continuation of a long essay into
finding how it is that we can come to live in this mysterious continent. It
began in the 1990s with the manufacture of wearable deep sea diving suits to be
used on fishing boats in the Great Southern Ocean where each of us could be
lowered to a depth where light failed and coldness reached the marrow of our
bones such that we embraced our own mortality and our European heritage's
relevance faded. At this point we could look up to the light above, be
pulled up toward the boat's deck and, Lazarus-like, birthed back on deck with
new eyes with which to see the Australian landscape for the first time. The
second body of work has been to make the tools of navigation and the beaten
copper maps that Leichhardt might use to leave the crowded shoreline of the
continent to traverse this distracted continent. Clearly the European
compass, set square, sextant and paper maps misdirected navigation across
the Australian otherness, and new navigation instruments are needed to be tuned
to the turn of the Southern Cross Constellation across the night sky, the
intricate and beautiful flight patterns of mobs of budgies and the sonorous
archetypal sounds of ocean waves found in a shell instrument of navigation. On
so flat a landscape only the beating of copper sheet against the earth can
elucidate the subtle and ongoing marks of time, occupation and undulation as
can be felt in fingertips.
These
artworks on the Inland Sea begin a body of work that asks the question "how can we live in the heart of this county of ours, once we have left its
crowded shores and travelled to its interior?" My collection of
observations from the coast of the inland sea are fragmentry to be sure, but I
am showing some evidence of attempts to make crossings and things found that
invite speculation upon the meanings we can attach to 'Australianess' and its
impact on how we can live productively and creatively with one another. Beneath
the spring blooming of the Prunus Serrulata von mueller what ceremonies can we
enact that connect us in ritual and collective shared cultural experience? Our
community well-being rests on each of us sharing our creative imaginations with
the rest of us. In a world of economic limits, our democratic and market-based
use of asset accumulation as a measure of social status is set to fail, and we
only need to look at tribal communities to see that in a shared garden (the
arithmetic economic growth of feudalism) social worth is attributed to those
that grow the best yams, those whose dancing, singing, painting and other story
telling activities are best enjoyed and those whose shared cultural creativity
is the source of the regard they have in their community. A steady-state
(non-growth) economic theory will need to be structured on sociological frames.
Up until only a mere 200 years ago we lived in an agrarian economy of small
markets, barter and subsistence. This was an economy in which there was an
ongoing contest between, as Malthus put it, geometric population growth and
arithmetic agricultural growth. We then devised a mercantile model of
investment (including the future in our economic equation) that resulted in a
turbo market mechanism. It was, to use a metaphor, like building an internal
combustion motor versus maintaining and riding a horse. We have, in the 'shed'
of economics and engineering, built a wonderful V8 turbo-charged motor in the
course of those 200 years. We started the motor and were stunned by its sheer
power but in that short period of just 200 years (Man, we just got it running
right!!), we have come to see that for all its power and beauty, it consumes
fuel like there is no tomorrow, and belches fumes that choke those of us in the
shed (most of us, as you know, are outside the shed looking in). Someone
pointed out that while it could, in a slight frame, power us down the straight
in 3.5 seconds for the quarter mile, in fact it was to be installed in a bus
body, as we all of us needed to be transported by it to our collective future.
The task before us is to modify the V8 motor to pull a community bus on very
little fuel (or alternative fuels) gently and reliably. Our steady-state
economy has to be about the bus frame, seats, comfort station and all else, as
much as it has to be about the dynamics of the motor itself. This is why the
work ahead requires a new set of definitions on the quality of life, and why
asset accumulation will have to become a non-measure of community and
individual feelings of wellbeing, and why, (because I am sure you have
forgotten by now) we need new rituals, ceremonies and social engagements
beneath our newly discovered Prunus serrulata von mueller tree.
So Kent,
let this work inspire others to investigate the diverse coastal life to be
found along the shores of the inland sea and let the brave put out into it and
sail their way across the heart of our mysterious and wondrous country.
KENT:
These are wonderously romantic passions Anton. That probably should be romantic
with a capital 'R', but I can't abide by such heirarchical concessions, so I'm
maintaining a lowercase democratic level-playing field of ideological artistic
movements. And the romantic urge is on the upswing in recent times as we all
feel compelled to re-embrace an environmental awareness in the face of the
consequence of our collective actions, driving ever onward with the smoking
combustion engine of our consumerist urge.
With
this in mind, I wanted to ask you about your materials. You often use metals -
brass, bronze, steel and copper - in your various creations. What draws you to
these elemental and heavy substances hewn from below the surface of the planet?
Your reference to the "romantic" caused me to write volumes on
Modernism, Post Modernism and Suzi Gablik's call for a 're-constructed' and
're-enchanted' participatory kind of art practice (Gablik. S 'The
Re-enchantment of Art', Thames and Hudson, London, 1998) that was central to my
PhD thesis (2002) investigations into the experiential nature of Art. Lucky for
you, I have put these aside for another time, and will let it (the 'Romantic'
description) slide past, except remarking that those who follow the followers
of others are already two steps behind themselves, however great they may
personally feel at being one of the 'in' crowd. My journey as an artist is
within and through and about the insights I can gather from my own personal
experience of life unfolding before me. Not that this needs be diaristic alone,
or completely self-obsessed, for as you can see I tackle historical, political
and social ideas through the lens of my own personal feelings and my thoughts
about my place within these contexts. Perhaps I am naughty doing this!
Everything I know has been or is being framed in my own imagination. Artists
are people who are excessively attracted, I expect, to their own
moment of living, and they document the substances wrung from investigations
into this 'being' that never stops, day and night. Yes, I will let you call it
'romantic' but I cannot see what the alternative might be! Might an alternative
be that there are clever emerging artists who are encyclopaedically aware of
the cultural context, who are networked and networking, connected to the
cultural power centres and those significant individuals at the centre of these
art groups, sophisticated, global, fashionable, smart and successful? I have
heard it put that way, and I can kind of see the tribalism that underwrites
these followers and their followings. Hey, I am starting to fire up again.....
enough!
Yes, OK,
call me romantic, but what I will hear as you say it is that here is someone
doing their very best to make sense of so complicated a thing as being alive
amongst so many other equally alive others. When I was in grade 5 a boy said to
me one day after school that he was going home to "mum"! I was really
confused. I was going home to "mum", he wasn't going to be there! I
had no idea where he was going to go to, but in all truth, I knew that where ever
he might go, he was not going home to "mum". It made me wonder where
he was going to go that night, in fact, where did they all go after school?
Luckily for me, in my confusion, I still had my mum to go home to and to feel
safe by. Accepting that others are not just figments of one's imagination is
not easy at all. To accept that every other person I meet is as introspective,
questioning and in search of a meaning to their life as I am for myself is
difficult. But it is true. No, really, it is! It is. You who read this writing
must see that I am one like you... indeed, very like you... even worryingly too
like you... OK, not just a passing shape, not a fragment of any kind of your
dreaming, no, not even another part of you. Just very like you. Awfully like
you, probably! (OK, I have "mum" and you don't, but I should try to
get past this feeling). So, I make art to tell my story of me to me, and I want
you to make your art (any kind at all will do) to tell your story to yourself,
to which I can listen in. I know from going into the studios of my
friends that their works inspire me, thrill me, and make me want to run home to
my studio to make works in response to their work, and when they come to my
studio I see their eyes widen (now and then) and feel their wanting to run home
to make work that responds to my work. I make work for me, but I hope it brings
out responses in others that assure me that their interior lives are as vast
and as fascinating as I find my own. And so very similar too. In an ideal world
we all will make works manifesting our self conversations, and these works will
resonate with one another, and shared creative imagination will be the test of
social connectivity, the measure of social contribution, the gold standard of
social worth and the final realisation that we are not alone in the world. In
this utopian (but possible) world there are no artists, just people engaged in
collective play with themselves and with others.
So, what
materials do I like to work in? For a long period I enjoyed working with cheap
materials like the steel of 44 gallon drums or corrugated iron in large scale
sculpture and in cast bronze for studio work, having kept a studio foundry
since 1983. But the slow rusting away of these works became unbearable. Beautiful
steel sculptures slowly dissolving renders the immense work and effort put into
these sculpture invisible through time, and so in the early nineties when
building my bluestone house that will never leave the landscape, I decided to
only work in materials of permanence, so that my 'messages in a bottle' can
reach those in the future with which they might resonate. I work in copper,
bronze, stainless steel and laser-cut steel plate as and when these materials
make appropriate sense of the form and concept of the work. Naturally, as much
of my work is for public-spaces, materials that are robust through time are a
requirement for this practice. I am very interested in new digital
possibilities in sculpture and matching these with traditional processes from the
ancient forms of art making. As the new bell designs are possible only with
sophisticated digital design software, the casting of the bells happens using
ancient techniques reaching back to the start of the bronze age. I make relief
prints using laser-cut stainless steel plates whose images are developed in
design software, but print the plates on a printing press with traditional
printmaking papers and inks. They could be digitally printed of course, but
something truly beautiful happens when old and new processes and technologies
are brought together to make works of art. In this exhibition exploring the
inland sea, I have used brass and copper plates and applied hand-beaten
textures to create particular surfaces and then applied traditional chemical patinas
to colour the metal through corrosion. Somehow this process allowed me to look
for playful ways of making sea surfaces that felt the tidal currents beneath
the surface and the wind pressure above the undulating surface plane.
These
materials are a continuation of, and development from, those used in the last
two exhibitions at LaTrobe University VAC ('The maps of
Leichhardt' November 2010) and at Woodbine Art in Malmsbury ('Leichhardt's
Bell' March 2011) and so remain consistent with the quest to explore Australian
identity through imagined history. I love working with elegant materials like
these and working out how to shape them to get the look and feel I want. As I
work the material, I trust that my hands will leave the marks and shapes in the
materials beyond my direct intention, as they work tuned to subliminal
sensibilities that I cannot control. My work surprises me and gives me joy and
when it works well it is much more than I intend, and the more is the better
part. That is the challenge of making things and images, and always chasing the
thing you imagine. Each work is a pearl on a thread followed in trust and
pleasure. I hear of artists destroying works, but no working in the 'third
person' (see earlier comment) for me. I love my works and while none are
perfect, (we agree!) none are separate from the others either. It is a body of
work that is left, but in process, there is always the wonderful thing
imagined, the struggle to realise the imagined thing best as one can, but
imperfectly achieved, and the newly imagined thing glowing in beauty and wonder
that has grown out of the previous wondrous imagining(s). How good is that, to
chase down thoughts and feelings, hand over fist? So, Kent, I hope these
works in the exhibition give those who share them some of the pleasures they
have given me.
______
Anton’s exhibition, ‘Quest to find an inland sea’, runs until April
8, 2012. All of his beautifully hand-wrought, narrative-imbued metallic
artworks serve as individual reliquaries, his passionate ideas poured into the
fabric brass, bronze and copper. Forming a horizon line around the gallery
space, they enframe the viewer and the large Cherry Blossom tree that reaches
upwards toward the sunlight that fliters down through the industrial era factory
beams. Wonderful stuff.
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