Young and Modern: Craig Johnson on the Paintings of Alan Young

Everyone by now can recognise the determined individuality of an Al Young painting. Dense visual information. Movement and spontaneity. Improvisation. Jarring colours. Marks so crudely applied as to be of a child’s hand. Big doses of brightness. Big flatness. Thickly applied surfaces. Words that become painted objects, that become words. Ironic, revealing titles, Mr and Mrs Non-Perfect or Being Questioned About Your Appearance, and occasionally a secret equation: 1 + 1 = Great Fun or Alcohol = Lots and Lots of Trouble. Crudely constructed, yet holistically conceptualised compositions – sometimes. Hints towards Jean-Michel Basquiat. Primary gestures and conspicuously imperfect shapes. Colour, direct from the tube, direct from the factory.Everyone knows what to expect of the content: the world of today, of cities, televised sport, dance parties and late night hangouts, motorised landscapes, crazy drivers, urban confusion, alcohol consumption, frenzied medication, and in particular, the subjects that occupy these modalities, as portraits and self-portraits, which overlap and fuse.

Crazy Way of Having Fun, 2006

This is just compiling the obvious, as the crowds at the solo exhibitions Wine, Dance, Song in 2006 and Nobody’s Perfect in 2007 might attest.¹ Less obvious, or at least much less discussed, is the situated nature of Young’s work in relation to modernism. His stated inspirations – Philip Guston, Gareth Samsom, Gordon Bennett, and most of all, Basquiat – belong to the late twentieth century, although, as Peter Timms usefully pointed out in the catalogue essay to Nobody’s Perfect, while Young’s paintings have a debt to Basquiat, they nevertheless ‘have a longer and more solid lineage.’² While I disagree with Timms’ outline of the ‘biblical’ as the prime operative mode of a Young painting – its essentially hermeneutic need to communicate a moral in pared down shapes, like a medieval church’s stained glass window – I do accept the registry of overtones of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, those great masked rappers of modern art, and Dubuffet’s acute eye for children’s art, which operates radically outside of convention. For many, Young’s paintings feel closer to an undeconstructed high modern art than the wildly expanded field of contemporary art.³ This feeling is warranted for many reasons.

Let me jump in at the deep end. In Young, there is a post-hierarchical disintegration at work that is close to proto-Analytic cubism. Close, not the same. There is nothing pure or dogmatic about this. It is simply the arrival point of Young’s pursuit of a signature style. The advantage of a true signature style is that no other mature artist’s work might be confused with his. Young is not a fashionable eclecticist. He has developed a style that finds a hybrid point of expression, temporally, after the long reign of the western European abstract, and its exportation to Australia (via, say, Sidney Nolan, as late as the 1940s).

I do not wish to make a big deal of Young’s immediate heroes – Guston, Samsom, Bennett, Basquiat – which are sometimes conscious and at other times retrospective, revealed to him either through study or museum visits. They are useful, however, in marking out the territory out of which Young’s aesthetic has emerged. These are painters normally associated with the broad postmodern ‘return’ of painting, in the 1980s, and occasionally acquired the epithet ‘neo-expressionist’ by critics wanting to signal an artistic difference after two decades of an art world hijacked by post-war deconstruction and neo-avant-garde conceptualism. In other words, painters in the avant-garde of painting: they each have important critical, and for Bennett, political edges. Young absorbs from these artists not a content or a situation, but aspects of an aesthetic language. For him they have helped legitimate a visual language that is rooted in the departure from realism, in self-conscious play of the application of paint. I am tempted to say that Young’s paintings strive to look like paintings, almost in a Greenbergian way, to announce themselves as such. They do not carry the viewer away from art, but deeper into it, into perceptual visuality.

Sky Dancing, 2006

We would be grasping at straws to state the political in Young’s work. Although, there is something of the political in the construction of a new language, a private language, a kind of aesthetic mini-Utopia, that refuses top-down acceptance of how the world already is. Think of Klee’s great slogan: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible, it renders visible.’ In this sense they strive, admirably, for the once-revered and idealised autonomy of art that was modernism. (But also, a happy apolitical function, his paintings, like those of the moderns, look great on white walls and are readymade and perfectly sized for nice apartments.)

If the first constitutive feature of Young’s oeuvre, thus far, is the creation of a visual language, the second seems to lie in a formal indecision: figuration or abstraction. In his article, Timms registers a shift away from the struggle between figuration and abstraction, observing how, ‘Figures merge with their backgrounds. Shapes that appear important to the moral or to the story are treated identically to those that seem merely to serve as embellishments.’ Significantly: ‘No visual hierarchies can be discerned.’ This is not without paradox. In Young’s work a classical dualism is not overcome, it is magnified in one space. In art history, the simultaneity of the figural and the abstract were once unthinkable, especially throughout much of modernism, except as opposites. Modernity was an age that saw two sides of the great dualism of abstraction and figuration fighting for sovereignty, with abstraction always winning (Malevich and the Russians taking it to the end while still at the beginning; think of White on White in 1918 announcing the closure of art as imitation). Young declares no winner. Conclusions should not be sought here.⁴

Young’s work does not present a crisis demanding resolution. In his work we are confronted by an enigma that does not have to be solved (Timms called it a puzzle in which pieces are missing). The human hand is everywhere in these audaciously non-high tech units of culture. More than the hand, a whole physiological phenomenology is at work and remains visible in each brush stroke, each overdrawn line. Unlike the perfected design objects of current production, Young’s paintings herald the presence of a sensing subject for whom atmosphere is not transparent; space and solid are one. The paintings suggest the continued abolishment of the diachronic dimension that characterised painting in the modern period: the present, the living body, is the tense of his paintings.

Craig Johnson is a postgraduate research candidate in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, NSW.

Footnotes

1. Wine, Dance, Song at the TMAG’s Bond Store in 2006 and Nobody’s Perfect at Despard Gallery in 2007.

2. Peter Timms, “Alan Young,” Nobody’s Perfect, catalogue essay, 2007.

3. The curator David Hansen, for instance, who has followed the relocation of Young’s student practice in Hobart to his current practice in Melbourne, once said that at art school Young’s ‘idiosyncratic expressionist style set [him] apart from [his] politely post modern peers.’ While David Walsh, museum auteur of the moment, hangs his Al Young paintings next to his Kandinsky paintings in his Melbourne apartment, possibly to make the same kind of point.

4. The artist recognised this in his master’s thesis, Painting a Visual Language that Interprets My Personal World (2005), through the words of Gareth Samsom. Only for Samsom, such a hybrid between the abstract and the figurative was equated with a ‘struggle.’