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When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone
in the wind. You can never recapture it again.
— Eric Dolphy
Brisbane. Summer 2001–2002. The hottest Christmas season for almost a century. I am sitting in Ian Friend’s studio viewing work which is to appear alongside the text of J H Prynne’s sequence of poems The Oval Window. There is little movement in the air, though it is not as stifling as the previous day and night. The tropical edge in Australia’s third city might seem some distance from Friend’s origin and Prynne’s continued presence in England. But presences and absences, insides and outsides and the interfaces with which the artist’s and the poet’s work deal are only too vivid in a heat that seems to break down any boundary between the body and its surrounding envelope. In the muzziness cars on the freeway nearby seem both closer and more distant. At night the lights of the inner suburbs seem organic themselves, a virtual heat-map. The atmosphere joins us to the objects of our vision (or our hearing) as much as it separates.
The title of J H Prynne’s sequence alludes to the aperture in the middle ear, an ‘oval window’ containing delicate crystals, in which sound waves are transformed into neural impulses. It is a point at which ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ intertwine; in Friend’s terms a ‘threshold site’, an ‘interface’ between within and without. The mechanisms of the ear are known to form rapidly in the foetus, underlining its importance as an organ that affects our sense of balance. Within the labyrinth of the inner ear the small crystals respond to gravitational change. The space known also as the ‘snowdrift line’ is at the same time central to the construction of verbal language and itself a metaphor for our position in the world. Prynne’s poems negotiate between ‘disturbance and poise’ much as the ear itself encodes and decodes sounds as intelligible instances or as ‘noise’. The language of the poems is complex, witnessing areas of speech seldom brought into such an intimate relation. The codes of computer processing, the stock market, tabloid news and romantic poetry are seldom seen to physically occupy contiguous space, yet in daily life we negotiate between these ‘discourses’, a balancing act in itself.
Our eyes negotiate the visual world similarly. At the moment I see a desk with books and reproductions of art works, but if I half close my eyelids and change my focus I see floating molecular shapes moving across my field of vision, impossible to control with any directional impulse, just ‘there’. In Ian Friend’s work we are aware of ambiguous space and many levels of focus. The plane on which the figure and ground interact is almost (but not quite) flat. The ‘language’ spoken here recognises the impossibility of the non-objective.
The present is in itself a point of balance, a kind of firewall between past and future, a point which is at once here and hard to locate (as opposed to experience). A note at the beginning of Prynne’s sequence makes the deadpan observation that ‘given the present, the past and the future are independent of each other’. Repetition and difference become through time, one and the same. This is the sense of the old saw that ‘you cannot step twice into the same river (for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on)’. Its author, Herakleitos, noted in a further fragment: ‘change alone is unchanging’.
One critic of Prynne’s poems suggested that we should live in the moment of the poem, not shaping or controlling our reading. This is, of course, an impossibly ambitious claim. The pragmatics of everyday life where we seem often to be neither ‘in the moment’ nor ‘out of it’ intervene. But without ‘attention’ we might as well be nowhere. It is important with both Prynne’s poems and Friend’s works to ‘take time’ and to allow the elements of these pieces to float without unduly coaxing them into any preset form or symbolic reading which would force the work into a merely illustrative role. Our desire for closure, often a very strong desire, defeats the purpose of just being with what we are observing.
Writing of another artist, Willem de Kooning, Prynne observed that the idea of a series or sequence, the decision even to commit to working in a set format (similar size canvasses, vertical or horizontal), structures work which might seem at first glance spontaneous. Series and sequence introduce the element of time to the works. Ian Friend’s process of composition is a gradual one with many of these works taking up to two years to complete. The heavy paper on which the works are executed goes through several soakings as the diluted Indian ink wash and the white gouache are applied. The images have grown as they have been worked upon and with. In the artist’s terms the painting is witness to your ageing as you are to its own growth. The gouache ovals and dots decompose with the dampness but become clearer and sharper with the drying process. Forms can ‘run away’ when wet, or erode and chip as they dry, much as human bones diminish through calcification. Time and the process of ageing are apparent on this layered surface. The wandering lines of waterproof crayon tie panels together much as the bone shapes they often describe hold the body in place.
The panels themselves structure the work. While the earlier pieces are often single sheets the later work consists of doubled and tripled panels, usually (though not always) vertical (‘portrait’) sheets, joined horizontally to create a ‘landscape’ format. Friend talks of his interest in Mondrian’s work ‘Pier and ocean 5’ (1915), where horizontal and vertical structures are developed in relation to Theosophic principles. In this work the plus and minus shapes arrive at a point where a distinction between figuration and abstraction becomes hazy. Friend empathises with work like that of Ben Nicholson which goes through stages of ‘emptying out’ and increasing complexity; with Agnes Martin (‘the uneasy relationship of her work to minimalist practice’); and with Australian artists like John Brack (particularly his ‘battle’ paintings) and Roger Kemp. These artists all evade neat categorisation and, significantly for Friend, are concerned in their work with the metaphysical.
Earlier works in the sequence tend to be simpler: large ovals that seem to advance luminously from the picture plane. In the later work the gouache ovals and dots are smaller, varying greatly in definition, multiplied like cells that could represent growth in benign or malign (cancerous) forms (the works entitled ‘Joy at death itself’ celebrate this paradox). Friend’s sense of scale — the shift between the minute and the oceanic — parallels the sense that Prynne suggests in the slippage between technical, philosophic and journalistic languages, where the habit of ‘close reading’ is countered by the need to pull back and sense the movement of the whole. It parallels also the thought of another of Ian Friend’s touchstones, Gaston Bachelard, whose book The Poetics of Space deals with memory, the body, inner and outer spaces: a concern to ‘investigate the possibility of the existence of the metaphysical experience’. Neither Friend’s nor Prynne’s works function as ‘evocative metaphors’ however. They resist interpretation at the same time as they encourage reading. There is no ‘key’ to either the artist’s or the poet’s work. What are required of both viewer and reader are openness, attention and care.
The elements in Friend’s work are held, as it were, in suspension: a state of balance like that produced by the ear’s ‘snowdrift line’, like that of a dancer midway through a sequence, and also like a chemical suspension, its particles visible, neither resolved in solution nor separated through gravity, drainage or evaporation. These images have all the translucence of a membrane like that of the inner ear or like an x-ray in which some elements are blurred, some (the crayon lines) impervious. The sense of movement may be as pneuma or animating breath, though there is no ‘breathing space’ in the sense of a safe vantage from which to view a domain. We are immersed in process as much as we desire the vantage point or firebreak (perhaps a not inappropriate metaphor at the time of writing). The title of one of Prynne’s earlier volumes, Down where changed (1979) enacts this desire for closure or at least for a point of vantage or breathing space just as it denies the possibility. While the first two words suggest a seamless directional narrative the third, ‘changed’, cuts off that possibility and opens others. Instead of revelation, this space between narratives offers metamorphosis. Ian Friend’s sequence of works enacts Ovid’s opening sentence (from the Metamorphoses), ‘My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind’, suspending us in that very space where a thing becomes something else. As viewers we negotiate his surfaces laterally and focally, experiencing through reverie and reverberation these possibilities of the metaphysical. Only the edge of the paper brings us back into the physical world. The space of our own bodies. The space of the Gallery. The space of buildings, traffic and weather in the streets.
— 2002
Guy Davenport, Herakleitos and Diogenes, Grey Fox, Bolinas 1979.
Ian Friend, Interviews with the author.
Ian Friend, Letters to Anne Kirker, Queensland Art Gallery, 1999.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M Innes, Penguin, 1955.
J H Prynne, ‘A Discourse on Willem de Kooning’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse
Point’, in art, criticism and theory, London, Pluto Press, 1996.
J H Prynne, Poems, Fremantle Arts Centre Press/ Folio (Salt), South Fremantle;
Bloodaxe, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1999.
NH Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The poetry of J H Prynne,
Liverpool, 1995.
[Note: This article first appeared as a catalogue essay for Ian Friend’s exhibition ‘The Oval Window’ held at the Brisbane City Gallery from April 18 to June 16, 2002.]
http://april.edu.au/duggan-l/oval.shtml