In Tate Liverpool
- Artist
- Imants Tillers born 1950
- Medium
- Oil stick, gouache, oil paint and acrylic paint on 78 canvases
- Dimensions
- Overall: 2130 × 1950 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Tate and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, with support from the Qantas Foundation 2015, purchased 2018
- Reference
- T15522
Summary
Kangaroo Blank 1988 is a painting that was commissioned by Daniel Thomas, the then director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide as the final inclusion in the museum’s exhibition, The Great Australian Art Exhibition 1788–1988 (1988). Comprising seventy-eight canvas boards, numbered 16231 to 16308, an ongoing numbering system the artist has employed in his paintings since 1981, the work draws on a number of references from existing works of art, primarily the painting The Kongouro from New Holland 1770 by British painter George Stubbs (1724–1806), in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, and the work of Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa (1936–2010). George Stubbs was considered the foremost animal painter in Britain during the eighteenth century and was commissioned by Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) to paint two paintings of native Australian wildlife (kangaroo and dingo) following his return from Captain James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific (1768–71), the first British voyage devoted exclusively to scientific discovery. Stubbs was not on the voyage, and painted The Kongouro from New Holland working from written and verbal descriptions, sketches made by the onboard artist Sidney Parkinson, and a kangaroo pelt that Banks had brought back with him. Tillers came across Stubbs’ painting in a publication of Joseph Bank’s Endeavour Journal 1962 (Baume 1988, p.226).
Kangaroo Blank is a direct appropriation of Stubbs’ painting, manifested across all seventy-eight panels. In Tillers’ work, the central figure of the kangaroo depicted in the Australian landscape is substituted with a dark rectangular void, ‘a blank’, suggestive of something missing or a vacancy left to be filled. In its place are radiating lines emanating from a single point perspective, which are a direct reference to the work of Shusaku Arakawa. Part of the conceptual art movement of the 1960s, Arakawa’s paintings, drawings and other works aimed to explore the mechanics of human perception and knowledge (Shusaku Arakawa biography, Reversible Destiny Foundation, http://www.reversibledestiny.org/arakawa-and-madeline-gins/arakawa, accessed 29 November 2017). A recurring motif in his work particularly of the 1970s was the use of radiating lines from a single vanishing point that overlay the image. The concept of ‘blank’ in Tillers’ title also relates to Arakawa’s writing, in particular a publication by him and Madeline Gins, Pour Ne Pas Mourir/ To Not To Die (Paris 1987), which reflects on ideas of blankness, positing it as an emptiness with a fullness of its own.
In Kangaroo Blank Tillers, in his signature style, appropriated two divergent images from distinctly different historical and geographical contexts. Australian curator Nicholas Baume has described the work as a ‘point-blank confrontation, a new thought emerging from a collision of types’ (Baume 1988, p.226). The eighteenth-century naturalist animal painting of Stubbs meets the twentieth-century conceptual abstraction of Arakawa and both are transformed through Tillers’ processes of quotation, bringing his interest in debates around cultural centres and peripheries to the fore.
Further reading
Nicholas Baume, ‘Where truth is no stranger to fiction: Imants Tillers, Kangaroo Blank 1988’, in Creating Australia, Two Hundred Years of Art: 1788–1988, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery Board of South Australia, Adelaide 1988.
Wystan Curnow, Imants Tillers and the ‘Book of Power’, Sydney 1998.
Hart, Deborah (ed.), Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2006.
Manya Sellers, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and Katy Wan, Tate
November 2017
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