- Credp: Selected Essays, by Imants Tillers. Giramondo Publishing, $26.95.
On the Australian arts scene, Imants Tillers is an artist who is immensely respected by the academy - state art institutions, the Australia Council, and the universities - but has a limited following with the general art public. He could be called Australia's premier academic artist, who is working in a contemporary mode. But how many people would be able to name a single memorable artwork by this artist?
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Tillers has represented Australia at major international exhibitions, such as the So Paulo Bienal (1975), Documenta 7 (1982) and the Venice Biennale (1986) and has been the subject of several important survey exhibitions. Many people in Canberra will recall his major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, One world, many visions, in 2006.
He is a tough, cerebral artist, obsessively systematic, and his signature work, for the past four decades, consists of appropriated imagery that he has painstakingly painted on small canvas boards that are pieced together in a grid to create a composite whole. Frequently, the artist will float an enigmatic text over the composition that alludes to universal themes, sometimes concerning place, migration, identity and dispossession.
Each panel that he employs is individually numbered, and since embarking on his canvas board project in 1981, he has painted over 113,000 panels to date. This works out at about 275 paintings a year and speaks of a serious work ethic. Collectively, all of these panels are part of what he terms his Book of Power, a never-ending project. He writes in Credo, "The Book of Power is an algorithm. It has no regard for my feelings or physical well-being. The Book of Power has no empathy. No pity. It is machine-like. It is not me."
Tillers is exceptionally well-read and well-informed, and was not trained in an art school, but studied architecture at the University of Sydney. In 1968-69, he was one of the 110 students who assisted Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the Wrapped Coast project, where a million square feet of Little Bay, Sydney, was wrapped in light beige erosion-control fabric and 56 km of rope. The experience changed the course of Tillers's life, and he abandoned architecture to become an artist.
Tillers has always been an intellectual and articulate artist who, throughout his life, has written articles, catalogue essays and, more recently, his recollections. Credo is a selected anthology from 1982 through to the present. The artist has provided a short introduction and a lengthy afterthought titled "The sources". It is this final, almost 40-page essay that is the highlight of the publication and presents something of an autobiographic account of the artists, thinkers and people who have had the greatest impact on Tillers's development as an artist and as a person.
Now aged in his early 70s, there is a distilled wisdom in his late pronouncements, where he makes no attempt to dazzle or impress the reader and admits that, as a university graduate, he had never heard of Duchamp and that many of the breaks and changes in his career came about by chance. He frequently happened to be at the right time at the right place and encountered people who were to have a profound impact on his art. An obsessive mantra for his thinking on art and life comes from Stéphane Mallarmé's poem: "A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance".
I was surprised at how many of his essays I had read before, some more than once. His earliest, and possibly most controversial essay, "Locality fails", appeared in an early issue of Paul Taylor's journal Art + Text, back in the days when it was still authoritative and eagerly awaited. Tillers basically argued that there was no antidote to provincialism, and we should accept the fact and turn it to advantage. It is a strongly expressed article that boldly traverses territory that a non-indigenous person would usually steer away from.
On re-reading this article, as well as many of the others republished in Credo, they appeared somewhat dated. Many were specifically commissioned for a particular journal or exhibition and in this anthology appear a little homeless.
Personally, I would have liked to hear what the author thinks now about the issues that he raised up to 40 years ago, and how his thinking may have changed over the decades. Many anthologies compiled while the authors are still alive do avail us of this luxury.
This book is a useful addition to the Tillers collection of material and presents an insight into the thinking of a challenging, complex and somewhat enigmatic artist. He is one who has thought deeply over many years about what it means to be an artist growing up in Australia while still being intimately aware of the grand traditions of art that exist elsewhere around the world.
