Art Guide

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March/April 2010

A good ARI isn’t hard to find > NSW
Artist Run Initiative (ARI) Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 1: Paddington/Woollahra > NSW
The first week of Art Month Sydney kicks off across Paddington and Woollahra, collectively crowned ‘Precinct 1’ Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 2: Surry Hills/Darlinghurst > NSW
In reality Sydney’s gallery scene is a broad and vibrant kaleidoscope. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 3: Waterloo > NSW
Precinct 3 takes in the suburb of Waterloo, home to the Danks Street Complex which includes ten of Sydney’s commercial galleries. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 4: Redfern/Chippendale/CBD > NSW
Serendipitously there are two galleries in Precinct 4 that showcase Asian art, Read More

Discipline ain’t what it used to be
Donald Judd, one of the more influential founding fathers of minimalism couldn’t hack New York’s claustrophobia. Read More

The legacy of two great artists > NSW
Two significant Indigenous exhibitions, staged as part of Art Month Sydney, are East Kimberley Painting Revisited at Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay and Museum III at Utopia Art. Read More

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Lyndell Brown and Charles Green: War (NSW)

By Isobel Johnston

Being assigned the role of an official war artist must be a pretty big ask at any point in time. But when the war is as nebulous as the ‘war on terror’, with all the geopolitical issues overlaying it, finding a means of rendering images to capture it must be daunting.

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who work collaboratively in both the areas of painting and photography, are the most recent of Australia’s official war artists and ‘join the ranks’ of a long list of respected artists stretching back as far as WWI. From 2003-2007, they had access to military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq and Afghanistan, experiencing the everyday lives of the troops they spent time with.

The Australian War Memorial gave Brown and Green the task of recording the Australian Defence Forces in action, without laying down any constraints on the work they could make. One of their challenges was working in photography, the media of the media. Brown and Green had to overcome the expectations of military personnel that war artists either wield a paintbrush or a stick of charcoal, but not a camera.

Brown and Green took literally thousands of photographs, and, to use the old cliché, if a picture is worth a thousand words, do the maths and they must have a tome of text. But Brown and Green are not the only war artists to have amassed images. Wendy Sharpe, who documented ‘peace keeping’ efforts in East Timor in 1999, came home with some 500 drawings for reference. Nora Heysen, who was the first woman appointed as an official war artist, produced 170 works in response to her experiences of WWII.

Nora Heysen, Sister Ruth Daley, 1944, black crayon heightened with white, sanguine and sepia conte crayons, coloured chalks on paper, 48.8 x 40.3 cm. Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial. ART22672.

Making large quantities of images might just seem expedient if you’re ‘on assignment’ for relatively short periods of time. But it must also be about apprehension, making sense of the destruction, the scale and the geography of the conflict. It might also be seen as a means of mediating the experience, using the lens of the camera or the surface of a sketch pad as a psychological barrier; a way of getting some distance, a distance which usually only comes with time.

Every official Australian war artist has created a visible memory, which is both collective and personal. Nora Heysen, along with Stella Bowen and Sybil Craig, was commissioned to depict the women’s war effort. Donald Friend’s paintings of troops playing cards or showering give us a glimpse of the quotidian. A salient perspective, because, despite all the horrors of war, it is often pointed out that most of the time is spent waiting, a dull and numbing process.

In one of Brown and Green’s photographs, the words ‘road to nowhere’ appear stencilled onto the door of a truck. In another image, a moment of mundane interaction is fixed between a soldier and the local people. These photographs set up a dialogue between the intimacy of the personal and the enormity of the task at hand. Brown and Green’s work allows the viewer scope to see aspects of both the big and the small picture without being didactic or proselytising.

It could be argued that there is no longer a need for official war artists because we are constantly surrounded by a stream of high definition TV images straight from the scene. Yet the media’s images do not offer us any distance, nor any contemplative space to appreciate the lived experiences of war. Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’s exhibition, War, provides audiences with the opportunity to engage with unfamiliar aspects of the all too familiar ‘war on terror’.

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Twin Towers, Military Installation, Iraq, 2007, digital colour photograph, 37.4 x 51.7 cm. Printed by Chris Penning, Fini, Melbourne. Courtesy of the artists and GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney.

GRANTPIRRIE 3 September - 11 October