Peter Tyndall, Title: detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something … LOGOS/HA HA (Congratulations You Are Now a Member of the Art Cult), Medium: A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something… CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION, Date: 1987, Artist: Peter Tyndall. Photo: ANU Drill Hall Gallery.
Tucked away in Canberra’s suburbia is the remarkable art collection of Susan Taylor and Peter Jones. Formed over the past 25 years and presently weighing in with over 360 objects, their art collection marries passion with opportunity and personal development.
The ANU Drill Hall Gallery has mounted an exhibition selected from this collection that exhibits its depth, peculiarities, strengths and idiosyncrasies. The bulk of the Taylor and Jones collection falls into the category of minimal and conceptual art, mainly Australian, but also with a reasonable selection of New Zealand, European and American examples.
The exhibition and its catalogue function like an anatomy of a collector. We learn how the collectors became initiated into life as art collectors, the galleries they patronised and the artists they took under their wing and guided their development.
Peter Jones writes about their practice, “Our collecting behaviour reflects our love of learning”.
“When Susan and I respond positively to an artwork, we automatically analyse and discuss the reasons for our attraction to it. This process necessarily entails learning about the artist and their practice, and understanding the context of the artwork … We are in an ongoing process of education, regularly visiting art museums and galleries, seeing lots of shows, and assembling a large art and design reference library.”
John Nixon, Self-portrait (non-objective composition), 1987, enamel on plywood, 80 × 60 cm. Photo: ANU Drill Hall Gallery.
To those who admire Australian minimal and conceptual art, there is much in this exhibition that will be familiar. It was a movement that initially set out to rebel against consumerism, the art academy, the status quo and the commercialism of the art market and reached an early peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Ironically, it ultimately found refuge in the academy with many of its participants finding employment in art schools, and its art became the prized possessions of public art institutions and a few passionate collectors.
The predictable and revered works in this collection include Peter Tyndall’s interrogations of art and its audiences, with all the titles for the past few decades commencing with the words: “detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something … LOGOS/HA HA”. We have six of Tyndall’s works on display.
A key artist in this exhibition, both as an exhibitor and as a guiding light for these collectors, is the late John Nixon. A dozen works of his are included, highlighting his huge debt to Russian Suprematism and to Russian Constructivism of about a century ago. An outstanding piece is his Self-portrait (non-objective composition), 1987, that operates on so many levels.
Marie Hagerty, Plane girl 3, 2014, collage on paper, 56 × 77 cm. Photo: ANU Drill Hall Gallery.
In view of the location of these collectors, there is a healthy sprinkling of Canberra artists, including the clever collages of Marie Hagerty, such as Plane girl 3, 2014. There is the expected interest in photographic processes that led to the creation of some outstanding pieces like Bea Maddock’s Draw a non-simple boundary with only one inside, 1970, with its meditation on identity and on being and nothingness.
What, at least for me, was the unexpected highlight in this exhibition was the almost 70 pieces of largely conceptual, minimalist and funky jewellery on display. Many of the names were unfamiliar to me as I stopped and gasped over David Bielander’s necklace of Wiener sausages or Lisa Walker’s necklace of expired mobile phones. In many pieces, the craftsmanship was outstanding and the conceptual challenges provocative.
Maria Kozic, Perfect Match (Liz and Lassie), 1984, screenprint (ed. 2/5), 75 × 60 cm. Photo: ANU Drill Hall Gallery.
In this exhibition, we are admitted into a world of ideas, passionate quixotic quests and weird challenges. It is essentially a cerebral exhibition, and I am reminded of the observation made by the African-American writer, James Baldwin, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.” Although, unlike some Australian art collectors, for example, Joseph Brown, who insisted on having his portrait displayed with his collection, in this show, even without portraits, we learn much about Susan Taylor and Peter Jones and the ways in which their minds work.
I assume that, at the moment, they must find their home somewhat denuded. As the wonderful Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, aptly observed, “the true collector’s only home is his own museum”.
Bea Maddock, Draw a non-simple boundary with only one inside, 1970, colour screenprint (ed. 1/10), 79 × 56.5 cm. Photo: ANU Drill Hall Gallery
Eye to Eye: The Susan Taylor and Peter Jones Collection is exhibiting at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Kingsley Street, Acton, from Wednesday to Sunday, from 10 am to 5 pm until 15 June.
