(Quadrant Magazine, Saturday, May 1, 2004)
“IN THE LATE 1960s,” I read, “European and American artists began to question the very basis of art making.” Did they, one might wonder, escape the dilemma by finding employment as, say, carpenters or motor mechanics? Of course not. They persisted. And I am looking at some of their handiwork, shown under the generic title “International Art: Process, Matter, Form”, at the Australian National Gallery – of which, I hasten to mention, I am a Friend.
I avoid the confrontation between a lead pole and a lead plate. I forgo interaction with eight biscuit tins surmounted by illuminated photographs. I concentrate instead on an exhibit by Mario Merz, called Fibonacci Numbers. I know a thing or two about these numbers. They form a series in which each number is the sum of its two predecessors. It has intriguing connections with an array of natural phenomena. It relates to the disposition of leaves on a stem and seeds in a flower head. And the ratio of sufficiently large successive numbers in the series defines the felicitous shape known as the “golden rectangle”. Possibly, the series also represents the financial progress of a successful questioning artist, each new work fetching as much as the previous two.
Merz, it need hardly be said, is big-time in international art. He has been a leading member of the Arte Povera movement, initiated by an exhibition in Genoa in 1967 and so-named by art critic and curator Germano Celant. His work has appeared in major galleries in Europe and the United States, including, famously, a retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1989. It is characterised by the recurrence of leitmotifs. The first was the “igloo”: in the words of Celant, “a metal skeleton covered with fragments of clay, wax, mud, glass, burlap, bundles of branches, and political or literary phrases in neon tubing”. (There is a rather more up-market version of this structure made of porphyry in the gigantic fountain provided by Merz for the city of Turin, in which he resides.)
Later, “Merz began to utilise the Fibonacci formula of mathematical progression within his works, transmitting the concept visually through the use of the numerals and the figure of a spiral. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1972, he had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his iconography, to be joined later by the table, symbolic as a locus of the human need for fulfillment and interaction.”
Back to the construction in front of me. The materials are redolent of impoverishment. No porphyry, no Harley-Davidson, here. The background of synthetic polymer paint and metallic paint on a loose canvas vaguely depicts five pine-like trees. For the benefit of those having better eyesight than arithmetic, the Fibonacci series, running from one to 233, can be made out on each trunk. In front of the canvas there stand two wire-bound bundles of twigs, then an array of branches supporting part of a broken pane of glass. Neon tubular lights in the shapes of numerical digits are suspended from its upper edge. Their sequence appears to form the first eight Fibonacci numbers.
I RECALL A REMARK made by an artist about a Neo-plastic painting by Mondrian. The beauty of its composition would be destroyed, he said, if one were to move any of the vertical or horizontal black lines just a millimetre or two. It is an observation not easily verified. However, a friend of mine once performed an equivalent investigation at an exhibition in Kassel, Germany. During a moment of inattention by the attendant, he left his pocket comb protruding prominently from a small pile of household objects the merit of which, according to art critics, lay in its ineffable geometry. The intruder caused no stir. It remained in comfortable companionship with its neighbours and, as far as one can tell, the beauty of the whole assemblage was undiminished in the eye of the beholder.
Now this work by Merz, so it seems to me, has a property in common with that exhibit in Kassel. Unlike the art of Mondrian, it is robust. That is to say, one could mess it about quite a lot without detracting from any aesthetic appeal it may possess. The brushwood, certainly, would be a good candidate for random rearrangement.
But what of the tubular lights? A closer examination reveals a surprise. The first two are juxtaposed, and so are the third and fourth. Thus the first three numbers are not one, one and two; but eleven, twenty-three and five. What is going on here? Is Merz now questioning the very basis of the Fibonacci series? Or has a curator neglected to treat his conception with due care? Perhaps someone with the inquisitiveness of my German friend has been meddling. I resolve to return to the Gallery soon to see whether any adjustment has taken place.
But let me not be too analytical. The numbers, whatever their sequence, do not relate to anything else in the exhibit. The twigs are leafless and flowerless; the shape of the background canvas is not “golden”. I am now reminded of a staff development officer confronting us, staff in need of development, with an eight-digit number. He has written it on the first pristine sheet of his pad of butcher’s paper (butcher’s paper is an essential prop in this variety of performance art). He invites us to dwell on its significance. I venture to suggest it has no more significance than any of the other eight-digit numbers he might have chosen. “That’s right,” he says, “I did that just to get you thinking.” Maybe that is the modest aim of Mario Merz and the Gallery also. To some extent they have succeeded.
A postscript. The above was completed just before Mario Merz died, on November 9, 2003, soon after he had been awarded the Japan Arts Association’s Praemium Imperiale, the world’s richest arts prize. Nevertheless “a little judicious levity”, to borrow a phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson, may not be entirely out of place amongst the obituaries. Germano Celant is now the artistic director of the Artistic and Cultural Program of Genoa 2004. Doubtless, work by Merz will be prominent once more in the city in which he first became prominent.
THE MACROPOD 