POSTMODERN FORMS: JANET LAURENCE

Janet Laurence, b. 1949 Aust. In the shadow, site specific installation Homebush Bay, 2000

Laurence is a contemporary artist who works across a wide range of media including painting, photography and sculpture. She is probably best known for her site-specific installations such as In the shadow, which involves a 100 metre length of creek at Homebush Bay. It was created for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Unlike many installations, this one is now a permanent part of the landscape.

Laurence is very concerned with environmental issues, and all her work is involved with getting her audience to reflect upon these issues. Many of her works are actually acting to rehabilitate an area or a group of plants, whilst being artworks as well. So they have a double function: it’s not just something for people to look at. It’s engaging with the world in a particular way, a more politically active way than say, Christo & Jeanne-Claude or Andy Goldsworthy.

In the shadow, 2000, details

Laurence is also interested in memories of places and peoples, and the concept of change. We can see this in another work of hers. Edge of the Trees is an installation in collaboration with Australian artist Fiona Foley, in the forecourt of the Museum of Sydney. This consists of column structures of steel, sandstone, and timber.

Edge of the trees, 1995, sandstone, wood, steel, oxides, shells, honey, bones, zinc, glass, sound, 29 pillars

The work lists names of indigenous people from the Eora tribe from the early days of white settlement. They are engraved on sandstone, upon which the Sydney harbour area is built, and which was the material for the colonial buildings.

Timbers which originally grew on the Museum site were used, in early days, for buildings for the colony in Sydney. The timbers were salvaged from that building in the 1990s and ‘re-planted’ back at the Museum site for this installation. They were engraved with names of fruits and flowers from the Colonial Governor’s Garden, in Latin and in indigenous language. Steel structures are also included, designed to rust red into the sandy ground in which they are embedded. Names of First Fleet passengers are also included, engraved on zinc panels and fastened to the poles.

Coming from within the installation are a continuous sound recording of voices. They murmur quietly, you have to struggle to catch them. They are Koori names of places which were colonised by the British. The effect is that the voices sound like ghosts.

Edge of the trees, detail.

There are steel and glass structures as well, which contain material such as rock oxides, bone, shells and ash, which would have been from the indigenous campsites around the area. The structure is reminiscent of burial poles, where the bones of a deceased person are, after the flesh is gone, put into the pole as the final part of a funeral ceremony.

Aboriginal burial poles,Tiwi Island NorthernTerritory.

Veil of Trees, 1999 Sydney. (In collaboration with Jisuk Han.)

This installation is near the Botanic Gardens in Sydney. It comprises 100 red forest gums, 21 glass panels – laminated and enclosing seeds and ash with Australian poetry, and corten-steel panels containing LED lighting so it can be seen at night.

Laurence also often uses glass in her work. Glass is clear. It’s usually deliberately placed in front of an artwork or valuable display. It’s designed as a barrier to protect something precious. Or it’s used as a window, a portal between inside and outside. Either way, it’s designed with the viewer in mind. A viewer is imagined.

However it’s not as simple as that: glass can also reflect. There can be a sense of confusion of imagery…is what I’m seeing actually inside, or a reflection of what is behind me? Laurence has played with this confusion in her works. It is a postmodern idea, this deliberate confusion of where the art is vs. where the world is. It is a challenge to the idea of the art object. She also likes to blur the boundary between nature and man-made structure.

The artist has sought to create a place of healing. Once again, her installations perform a double role: artwork, and rehabilitation space.

Waiting: a medicinal garden for ailing plants, site-specific installation in Sydney Botanic Gardens for Biennale of Sydney 2010

Various Australian native plants were selected, and housed within this white structure. The separation into different sections is somewhat reminiscent of a museum display, or even like wards in a hospital. (The title phrase ‘ailing plants’ gives us a clue about the concerns of the work. ) There is a ‘maternity / fertility’ section which houses various seeds; an ‘intensive care unit’ for plants that are seriously ill; and a mortuary section which houses dead plants.

All the living plants are connectedby tubes, and water is pumped through to them using a solar-powered pump. They are mostly in glass vials or containers of some sort. The room is filled with light.

Waiting: a medicinal garden for ailing plants, details.

In the course of creating this work, Laurence consulted with plant experts from the Botanic Gardens. The plants that she uses that are sick could have been be a risk to healthy plants both in the structure and in the Botanic Garden. Because of this, they had to be covered in a semi-transparent, veiling material. This obviously introduces another formal aspect to the work. Fortunately, this worked in well with Laurence’s ideas. We have seen this veiling before….

Resources

‘A hospital for plants: the healing art of Janet Laurence’, in Art & Australia, Vol. 48 No. 1 2010, p.p. 64-67.

Janet Laurence’s website: http://www.janetlaurence.com/

Museum of Contemporary Art Education Kit: http://www.mca.com.au/media/uploads/files/ITB_Education_Kit_v3.pdf

Sydney Olympic Park Public Art: http://www.sopa.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/475309/fact_sheet_COMMU_Public_Art02.pdf

On Kawara, (Japan, b. 1933) Wed Dec 12, 1979, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 46 x 62cm

Yep, this is the artwork. Kawara is still in the process of doing a series – a long series – of ‘Date Paintings’, started in 1965 and still going. Each painting notes the date it was executed. That’s it. Kawara’s art was itself a documentation of a life shared with the viewer.

Sol LeWitt (U.S.1928 – 2007)

Drawing #146, All two-part combinations of blue arcs from corners and sides and blue straight, not straight and broken lines., September 1972. Blue crayon, dimensions variable.

This work has been drawn, in crayon, directlyonto the walls of the gallery in which it wasexhibited. What consequences does this approachHave?

Key features:*The use of language within

works, or sometimes being the entire work;

*Ideas were more important than an aesthetic object.

It looked at the links between words, ideas, and images.

Like Duchamp with his readymades, Conceptual

Art tried to make us aware of the context that we are viewing art in (e.g. an art Gallery; or the street.)

Joseph Kosuth (U.S. b. 1945), Titled. Art as idea as idea (water), 1966. Photocopy, mounted on board, 121.9 x 121.9 cm

So…what was Conceptual Art??