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| Joe Tilson |
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Conjunctions zurro/jersey tiger pera/garden tiger more/brimstone opimo/hoopoe zeppo/green woodpecker: conjunctions: the sign is the thing itself/the thing is the sign of itself The title Conjunction first occurs in the work of Joe Tilson in a series of rigorously geometric-modular abstract constructions made in 1965, in which distinctive wood-relief shapes were set out in slightly irregular patterns on a plane. Each had a subtitle drawn from late poems of Yeats - Meru, Byzantium, The Tower etc. - suggesting that the formal properties of the work might be seen as in some way emblematic, that the simple abstract image might provoke a complex poetic idea. There was no illustrative intent, no proposal of direct correspondence, no referential symbolism; what was implied was that an idea of the complex kind that finds embodiment in the words of a poem, an idea that might go in any direction, could be brought into the imaginative transaction between the spectator and the concrete visual image. It was not even necessary to go back to Yeats's poetry; the word of the subtitle had resonance enough, however mysterious or arbitrary. Like the quotations from older literatures, from the ancient classics, from Dante and Shakespeare, that are hidden, transformed and given new meanings in the accumulative modernist prose and poetry of Joyce, Pound and Eliot, Zukofsky and Olson (writers in whose work Tilson was immersed) the titles, subtitles and poetic borrowings in Tilson's work acquire their own associative and allusive burdens. Tilson has always been profoundly interested in the ways in which the objective and formal aspects of a work, its shape, the material of its construction, its configurations of components, are intrinsic to its potential meanings, and in the potentialities of the word as such. He began as a painter of images, but quickly moved on to wood relief constructions, in which material and image were one and the same thing. It wasn't long before the word or letter entered the work as a visual element with its own special import, sometimes allusive, sometimes self-referential in a pregnant deadpan way. Since the early '60s his work in all its phases has incorporated linguistic elements, and maintained its free association with the poetics of speech and writing, assimilated the visual aesthetics of the letter and the word. In these recent Conjunction paintings and prints the painted word, its letters freely configured in its own rectangle, has an objective actuality as vivid as that of the butterfly, moth or bird in the conjoined panels. These words are manifest things, visible and tangible; like the creatures depicted next to them they are made of paint. Of course both the words and the creatures pictured here have another existence outside the paintings, in the universe of objects and events, the world of things other than paintings and painted patterns. Out there, in the world, they belong in quite different domains, those of language and of nature; the one abstract and invisible, the other concrete and apprehensible to the senses. Language itself must of course find material forms, in the sound of the voice, in calligraphy, lapidary inscription, woodblock, stencil or print, all of which have figured prominently in one way or another in Tilson's work since 1961. Language and sign are essential to the naming and classifying of the energies and the orderings of the forms and properties of nature into the abstractions of the comprehensible order we call reality. It is the relation between those categorical domains, the dynamic constructions of art and language applied to the necessary development of a created living world, that has always been at the heart of Tilson's concerns. The language of poetry is ordered by the sequential structures of syntax; freed as it is by its images and metaphors from the rational logic of discursive language, poetry is nevertheless hard put to escape from the logic of the sentence as such. It is a logic, as Chomsky has demonstrated, that is natural to us, capable of generating apparently infinite variations and transformations of form and meaning. It is in itself a natural phenomenon. As a visual artist, however, Tilson has worked with other principles of order, likewise borrowed from the actuality of the phenomenal world: the orderings of accumulation and array, the alogical order of placing one thing next to another, as things are so often found in nature. In these paintings the words are 'set free', to borrow a metaphor from Hugh Kenner, who was thinking of Pound and Eliot, and above all of Mallarmé, 'liberated in magnificent but sober nonsense, which however beaten upon will not disclose "meaning".' The dynamics of relation in these paintings are those of proximity, of things placed next to each other; the principles that govern these pairings are those of juxtaposition and of conjunction. There is a difference. A juxtaposition of things (or words) may be entirely arbitrary, though the relationship may yield many possibilities of meaning, as in the chance meetings of objects in surrealist art and poetry, beginning with Lautréamont's 'beautiful chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table'. Tilson likes this kind of thing, and is not averse to using such a device. (Few of his Pop generation were untouched by surrealism.) A juxtaposition may have no particular significance. The term 'conjunction' has, however, a specific history in astrology, in which it signifies the coming together of astral bodies in the same sign. From this usage comes its definition as an encounter of objects (or words or ideas) that may be construed as fraught with significance, read as we 'read' the stars, for hidden meanings. This was very much in Tilson's mind when he first used the term, as his Yeatsian subtitles revealed. And in 1969-70 he included the text of Yeats's poem Conjunctions in his collage/construction He, She and It: 'If Jupiter and Saturn meet/ What a crop of mummy wheat!' Their diptych presentation suggests that the 'conjunctions' in these brilliant paintings, of beautiful creatures and estranged words (all of which are real - some are country dialect, some obscure, some common), are meant to be read, for the format derives from that of the open book, in which one page faces another, word set against image. But how to read them? This formal relation implies correspondence or connection, but the words do not match the image. A literal response is inappropriate; these are not pictures with captions or explanations or verbal descriptions: they are objects for contemplation. It is the imagination that must engage with them, and which must apprehend the words not in their commonplace usage but as mysterious objects, composed of letters that are as abstract and without 'meaning' as the shape and colours of a butterfly's wing, or the design on a bird's; they are things as mysterious, that is to say, and as marvellous, as garden tigers, hoopoes or porcupines. Separated from any other context than that of the image and design of the work itself, their constituent letters are freely arranged on their page like the strokes that make up a Chinese character, as if they were ideograms. Their conjunction with their creatures, celebrated in the colour and pattern of the surrounding fields, is of things placed together, in the ceremony of art, from those two different worlds, language and nature, each found only in the other. There is indeed something ceremonial about these Conjunctions: they are have the formality of heraldic devices on banners. The birds and butterflies are like those emblematic creatures that feature on the standards of the contradas of Siena, so proudly displayed at the ceremonies of the Palio, whose great banner (the Palio itself, for which the event is named) Tilson was honoured to design in 1996, a commission which no doubt intensified his interest in the possibilities of the Conjunction format with which he had been experimenting since 1994. (The Istrice/Porcupine is in fact a contrada emblem, and the painting takes its colours and pattern from its standard.) Like the devices on banners, shields and medals, the images of Conjunctions are precisely formulaic: the butterflies with spread wings (natural symmetry harnessed to emblematic purpose), the birds in profile, always on the left; the arbitrary word displayed on the right, like an abbreviated motto. It is in the nature of such conventions to reduce things to signs, to interpret the natural object as the message of the mythic. Around the central images are decorative fields of dynamically repetitive pattern, whose purpose is to catch and hold the eye, to intensify the banner's quickness of address to the beholder, to concentrate attention upon the signifying device at the centre. It is as a claim to the attention that these vivid patterns exist. Dissolving figure and ground, these patterns have no more pretension to an idealist abstraction than the designs of those carpets or textiles whose purpose is to enhance the human habitat with the colours of nature or those derived from its plants and minerals. These Conjunctions also bear a striking generic resemblance to playing cards, their corners rounded and their patterns often like those on the backs of the pack. One might imagine them as having come from an hitherto unknown pack of cards (its emblems, letters, numbers and images as formulaic as those of heraldry, as ordered as those of a taxonomic display of birds or butterflies) to be used in dealings in which chance and calculation combine in play to create unpredictable outcomes. Or perhaps from an esoteric pack to be arrayed for predictions; the dealing of the Tarot, we remember, creates 'conjunctions' like those in astrology. It is not surprising that the visual conceit of the playing card should appeal to Tilson; board games and devices for creative play have figured in his work since the earliest of his Pop inventions. As with the constructive components of the serial works in all earlier phases of his development, the cards of the deck are modular elements in a system in which every item is potentially interchangeable with any other, in an infinite number of permutations. Within the rules of the game, they are of equal value in potential moments of play; low cards in the required order may beat high cards in the wrong place. The value of a hand is based on principles of accumulation and array, on chance juxtapositions and conjunctions. Behind the apparently arbitrary sequences of play there is a hidden destiny, and the contingencies of the game, like those of life, are determined by an invisible but ineluctable order. Encountering these brilliant and beautiful Conjunctions arrayed in the gallery, we may properly feel they invite that kind of wonder that is a necessary aspect of what Keats defined as 'negative capability': 'that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' We may feel happy that we have been dealt such a hand, and forbearing to ask, what does it mean? we may set about our own creative imaginings, and be prepared to make our own play on reality. Mel Gooding January 2002 Hugh Kenner is quoted from The Pound Era (University of California Press, 1971); Keats from a letter to George and Thomas Keats, December, 1818. |
Biographical Note Joe Tilson was born in London in 1928. Having worked as a carpenter and joiner from 1944 to 1946, he served in the R.A.F. until 1949. Following his National Service, he went to St. Martins School of Art (with Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach) and then in 1952, to the Royal College of Art (with Peter Blake and Richard Smith). In 1955, after winning the Rome Prize, he lived and worked in Rome where he met Joslyn Morton, who was studying with Marino Marini at the Brera in Milan. They lived together at Cefalù in Sicily and in 1956, were married in Venice from their studio in Case Frollo on Giudecca. After some months in Catalonia, with Peter Blake, they returned to London where Tilson taught at St. Martins School of Art from 1958 to 1963, then at the Slade School of Art, University College, London; at Kings College, Newcastle upon Tyne; at the School of Visual Arts, New York and the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Hamburg. For more than forty years Tilson has been making and exhibiting paintings, constructions, reliefs, prints and multiples. Originally associated with the British Pop Art movement in the early Sixties, he was soon led in a different direction by his deeply held convictions and dissatisfaction with the technological and industrial progress of the consumer society. Art - Tilson has written - is a symbolic discourse of which mankind alone is capable…I think of art as a tool of understanding, an instrument of transformation to put yourself in harmony with the world and with life… The basic given data of experience and the physiological and psychological aspects of procreation, birth, growth and death remain relatively unchanged. As André Gide wrote, Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n'ecoute, il faut toujours recommencer. The themes Tilson chooses for his work aspire to transcend time and cut across cultures, to communicate the sacred in nature via references to pre-classical mythology, the North American Indians, the Dream Time of the Australian Aboriginals, Alchemy. Modular structuring devices - the letters of the alphabet, the days of the week, the circular mnemonic devices of Alchera which relate to the four Cardinal points, to the four Elements and to the four Seasons, the lunar months, labyrinths, ladders, words, symbols - are assembled in matrices layered with complex universal meaning. Tilson was one of the generation of British artists who studied at the Royal College of Art with Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, R.B Kitaj, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney in the 50's. Tilson first had his works exhibited internationally in 1964, at the XXXII Venice Biennale. Subsequently a retrospective exhibition at the Boyman's Museum in Rotterdam toured to Belgium and Italy in 1971. Other retrospectives of his work were held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1979 and at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol in 1984. He has also exhibited in many other countries and is represented in numerous public and private collections. His first one man exhibition was at the Marlborough Gallery, London in 1962. He continued to exhibit with them at their galleries in New York and Rome until 1977 when he joined the Waddington Galleries, London. Tilson has had at least one solo exhibition every year from 1962 to 2002 apart from one year. In 1990 Tilson exhibited at Fortezza Medicea in Cortona. In 1991 he showed at the Galerie Inge Baeker in Cologne; Tour Fromage in Aosta; Plymouth City Museum and twice with Waddington Galleries in London, in 1992. The year of 1993 brought exhibitions at Cooperativa Ceramica d'Imola, Gio Marconi, Milan and Multimedia Brescia. In 1994 Tilson had solo exhibitions in Genova at Galleria Rotta and at the Pinacoteca, Macerata. In 1995, as well as showing at Alan Cristea and Theo Waddington in the UK, Tilson had solo exhibitions at Palazzo Pubblico in Siena and Westend Galerie in Frankfurt. Tilson's work was now starting to include reliefs and sculpture in majolica and terracotta done over the last ten years with the Cooperativa Ceramica d'Imola, these were exhibited at the Bologna Art Fair. Le Crete Senesi, a series of paintings based on the countryside around Siena were shown at the Gio Marconi Gallery, Milan and the Pinacoteca Macerata and then shown at the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, for which city he was invited to paint a banner for the Palio of 1996. This year he also won the Grand Prix d'Honneur at the Biennale of Ljubljana followed in 1997 by a retrospective exhibition of prints at the Cancarjev Dom Ljubliana. The Mestna Gallery in Ljubliana and the Annandale Galleries, Sydney hosted solo exhibitions in 1996. Tilson's next solo exhibition in 1998 was to be at Marino alla Scala, Milan and then at Theo Waddington in the UK. Joe Tilson's one man exhibition, Selected Works, was shown at the Castello Doria in Porto Venere, in 1999. In the same year I Tilson (The Tilsons), a two person exhibition of Conjunctions and Terracottas by Jos, was held at the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Conjunctions travelled subsequently to the Galleria Communale d'Arte Cesena and the Pinacoteca Civica Follonica in 2000. In 2001 Tilson had a retrospective exhibition, Alchemie dei simboli, at Castelbasso. This exhibition toured to the Gio Marconi Gallery, Milan. The artist was also represented in three major group exhibitions. The first entitled Les Années Pop, was held at the centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in the Spring. Immediately afterwards his work also appeared in Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956- 1966 at the Menil Foundation in Houston, and lastly he contributed to Pop Impressions Europe/USA at the Saint Louis Art Museum. He has three children: Jake, Anna and Sophy, and lives with his wife Jos in London. During the last thirty years he has spent several months of each year at their house in the hills near Cortona in Tuscany. Tilson was elected a member of the Accademia Nazionale di San Lucca, Rome in 2001. In 2002 he will have a retrospective exhibition at the Sackler Galleries, Royal Academy while exhibiting prints at the Alan Cristea Gallery and recent paintings at Beaux Arts, London. Tilson is represented in Britain by Beaux Arts, London and by Alan Cristea Gallery for his graphics. In Italy he is represented by Gio Marconi, Milan. Public Collections National Gallery of Australia, Canberra,
Australia.
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