Andrew McQualter: November Compositions

Andrew McQualter

November Compositions

Andrew McQualter

November Compositions

Placeholder 2014 (detail)

‘… walking, walking walking … thinking, thinking, thinking …’Sue Cramer

Andrew McQualter seeks to depict ‘the types of spaces in which thought happens’1, suggesting ways of communicating and describing objects and ideas. His wall drawings and sculptures in this exhibition invite viewers to draw connections across the gallery space and speculate as to their open-ended meanings. A small drawing pinned to an aspen tree bears a pivotal motif: a figure (the artist) walking in circles, deep in thought, as if he is ‘perambulating around an idea’.2

The notion of pinning a drawing to a tree came to McQualter after seeing a telegraph pole with a flyer taped to it when he was out walking and thinking about this exhibition. To translate this improvised urban signpost into the artwork Placeholder (2014), he sourced from Heide’s garden an aspen that—having overreached the property’s boundary—had already been assigned for chopping down. Linking the inside spaces of the gallery with the natural world outside, Placeholder acts as a marker or touchstone within what McQualter calls the ‘thought landscape’ of the exhibition.3

1 Conversation with the author, 6 October 2014. 2 The phrase is borrowed from Andrew McQualter, email to the author, 20 June 2014. 3 Email to the author 31 October 2014.

Arranged around this focal work, three wall drawings show figures and objects situated within large perspectival diagrams based on the dimensions of the room in which they are being shown. The diagrams act as framing devices—rather like thought bubbles—for discrete but related ‘compositions’, each a moment of reflection, a stop along the way. One work depicts a scholar’s rock used in Chinese tradition as a focus for philosophic meditation and contrasts this with a man using a tape-measure as a means to interpret space. Metaphysical and empirical modes of relating to the world are succinctly counterpoised here.

Another work re-enacts an occurrence McQualter observed one day on a tram: a person held out their earphones to a friend sitting opposite so they could listen to something they were enjoying on their iPod, a simple act of connection that to McQualter was analogous to an artist trying to transmit their ideas to an audience. In a third wall-drawing, a young woman’s expressive hand gestures become like a kind of dance or sign language describing aspects of the gallery space. As so often in McQualter’s work, the image is both ordinary and enigmatic.

Like the philosophers he enjoys reading, McQualter looks to the common, everyday world,—what Ludwig Wittgenstein refers to as ‘our shared practical life together’4—to find examples of how meaning operates, and for the iconography of his work. Linked to this is the way he locates his practice within an immediate locale and a specific artistic community by populating his wall drawings with figures that are recognisable as portrayals of artist peers, or of himself;

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Heide Museum of Modern Art

4 Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (1953), as cited in Wittgenstein, directed by Derek Jarman, produced by Tariq Ali, released Japan and UK, 1993.

something he has done since his first wall drawings in 1999.5 Similarly, the artist’s tools and the activities McQualter might perform when preparing for exhibitions, especially those associated with describing or quantifying spaces or things—like measuring distances, photographing objects or marking out areas on the floor with masking tape—are often depicted in his work, the means of artistic practice forming part of its content. A new development in his work, the perspectival diagrams in November Compositions reference the architecture of Heide’s project gallery in a literal, self-referential way, but also frame questions the artist poses to himself as he considers the gallery space, what artworks to exhibit in it and what they might convey. ‘I think of the exhibition as an allegory of process’, he says.6 Here McQualter also takes inspiration from early Renaissance frescos and their framing of separate incidents within larger allegorical narratives, and he also cites as influential Sol LeWitt’s spatially ambiguous wall drawings of cubes.

Aside from the tree, the only object-based work in the room is for Geoff (2014). Displayed on a workman-like table, it refers to the large blackboard ruler McQualter uses to make his wall drawings but has an important difference; the mathematical gauge of the ruler has been replaced by a colour scale, signifying a realm of perceptual experience that is beyond empirical measure. Its progression of soft hues from lilac through to yellow is based on exercises McQualter performed when studying theories of colour at technical school, particularly those of Bauhaus artist Johannes

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ANDREW MCQUALTER: NOVEMBER COMPOSITIONS

5 Referring to this McQualter has said: ‘When I started I was interested in institutional critique but wanted to do this in a way that was not intimidating, so I presented life-size images of my artist friends doing the things that artists do’. Public talk by Andrew McQualter at Heide Museum of Modern Art, 18 October 2014. 6 Email to the author 29 September 2014.

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Itten, whose writings, McQualter recalls, ‘opened up a whole world of thinking for me’.7 Colour is important too in the wall-drawings—flashes of yellow heighten the significance of objects like the iPod and tape measure, while the watery application of pale purples, blues and greys imparts a quality of otherworldliness to the images, like that of reflections in a pond, or the shadows in Plato’s Cave. McQualter describes how as the figure and motifs in the exhibition took shape in his mind, he felt he was grasping them ‘out of a mist or atmosphere’, and when displayed he intends them to have ‘an air of mystery’.8

Within McQualter’s repertoire of images, trees have a special place. In an important wall drawing Vision Statement, 2001, he used the pictorial device of a tree trunk as a diagrammatic manifesto of his practice, with each outspreading branch representing a different thought-path, and elsewhere he has pictured saplings requiring water and nurture, or used trees as generic signs within a semiotic game. As McQualter explains ‘The tree is an organising principle in my work, it has always stood for my practice’.9 Bringing an intrinsic beauty to the gallery space, the aspen in November Compositions occupies an allusive philosophic terrain, even while its presence is strikingly physical. The artist’s perpetual walking in circles, the struggles of the thinker as visualised in the casually affixed drawing, contrast with a sense of the tree simply and unselfconsciously being. McQualter shares

7 Email to the author 9 November 2014. The book referred to is Johannes Itten, Faber Birren (ed), The Elements of Color: A Treatise on the Color System of Johannes Itten Based on his Book The Art of Color, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York, USA, 1970. 8 Email to the author 4 October 2014. 9 Conversation with the artist 6 October 2014.

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Wittgenstein’s suspicion that too much thinking doesn’t always help, that ‘nothing is hidden, everything is open to view, its only philosophers who muddy the waters’.10

An artist shaped by the ideas of postmodernism, McQualter is concerned as much with how as what meaning is signified through art. How can an image or idea in one person’s mind be transmitted to another’s? The thinker (or artist’s) search for the essence of things, or a reason to create, might never reach conclusion, but there is delight in articulating the pursuit and in November Compositions there are moments of wonder and insight to be experienced along the way.

10 Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (1953), as cited in Wittgenstein, directed by Derek Jarman, produced by Tariq Ali, released Japan and UK, 1993

Figure with tape measure and scholar’s rock 2014 (detail)

Two figures with an iPod 2014 (detail)

A description of a room 2014 (detail)

for Geoff 2014 (detail)

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BIOGRAPHY

Andrew McQualter was born in 1970 in Newcastle, New South Wales and currently lives and works in Melbourne. He attained a Certificate of Art and Design at Hunter TAFE, Hamilton Campus in Newcastle in 1988 and a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) majoring in painting, from the Victorian College of the Arts at The University of Melbourne in 1994.

Since 1995, he has had eighteen solo exhibitions, notably at 1st Floor Artist’s and Writer’s Space in Melbourne in 1995, 1996 and 2002; at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne in 2002; at Stichting Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 2006; at Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, Victoria in 2013; and at Daine Singer in Melbourne in 2012, 2013 and 2014. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Melbourne; Sydney; Perth; Santiago in Chile; Hoorn in The Netherlands; and Seoul in South Korea. He curated or co-curated five exhibitions between 1995 and 1999 and several articles by him on visual art were published between 1994 and 2000.

McQualter is represented by Daine Singer in Melbourne and a full biography can be found at http://www.dainesinger.com/andrew-mcqualter

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Andrew McQualter in 2012 using his blackboard ruler to create a new wall-drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria. Image courtesy of the Photographic Services Department, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

EXHIBITED WORK

Andrew McQualter

Placeholder 2014aspen tree, watercolour on paper, pin

Figure with tape measure and scholar’s rock 2014 synthetic polymer paint on wall

A description of a room 2014synthetic polymer paint on wall

for Geoff 2014synthetic polymer paint on wood, steel, screws

Two figures with an iPod 2014 synthetic polymer paint on wall

All works are courtesy of the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition:


Curated by Sue CramerHeide Museum of Modern Art, MelbourneSaturday 18 October 2014 – Sunday 15 February 2015

© Heide Museum of Modern Art, the artist, authors, designer and photographers.

Design: Tristan MainPhotography: Christian CapurroISBN: 978-1-921330-40-7

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sue Cramer warmly acknowledges Andrew for his commitment to his work and thoughtful realisation of this exhibition. Thanks also to Heide staff, particularly Exhibition Manager Samantha Vawdrey, Head Gardener Dugald Noyes, Gardener James Dodd and Designer Tristan Main.

Andrew McQualter would like to thank Sue Cramer, Robert Bridgewater, Dugald Noyes and Samantha Vawdrey for their assistance in bringing this project to fruition. Many thanks also to Katherine Huang, Graeme Hairsine, Helen Walter, Oscar Yanez, Daine Singer, Geoff Robinson and Dez Mair for their friendship and generosity.

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7 Templestowe RoadBulleen Victoria 3105AustraliaT +61 3 9850 1500F +61 3 9852 0154heide.com.au

Documents

Andrew McQualter: November Compositions