Inspiration: Black and White and Red All Over

The Justin Art House Museum (JAHM) featured their collection of black and white abstract works in the exhibition Black and White and Red All Over. It was one of five exhibitions that make up a group of satellite shows curated to coincide with The Field Re-visited at the NGV. 

Peter Hill wrote a catalogue essay for the JAHM exhibition entitled: Peter Hill’s Black and White Travel Diary. In the essay he makes many observations about individual works of art that will be in the exhibition, and about abstract art in general. I have listed a number of quotes below that have informed my thinking about abstract art and the artists working in this field.

Quotes 

(Bold is my emphasis)

• 'Any meditation on black and white – and its minimalist handmaiden monochrome – must also be a reflection on the nature of colour.'
• 'Wittgenstein’s great book, Remarks on Colour, written in his signature style of numbered paragraphs...'
• 'Colour is seductive, but black and white – tonal values, one of the hardest things for young art students to understand and to use effectively – are the structure, the scaffolding, of all good art practice from charcoal drawings to filmmaking (think of the great black and white images created by Sergei Eisenstein from his masterpiece Battleship Potemkin, with music by Dmitri Shostakovich that so inspired the paintings of Francis Bacon).'
• 'Albert Irvin would talk about black whites, and white blacks. Like a conjurer, in a studio full of props, he would show the students a scrap of white paper and then let it fall on an even whiter piece of card on the floor, where it immediately turned dark grey. A shard of what appeared to be black card, when dropped onto a truly Guinness-dark roll of paper, magically turned - if not white - then certainly a very light grey.' 
• 'Later, Charles and Leah would remind me of the book The Secret Lives of Colour, by Kassia St Clair and a particular Zen-like passage that fascinated them, dealing with the difference between light and pigment: "Mixing coloured light makes white, while mixing coloured paint makes black, lies [at the heart of] the science of optics. Essentially there are two types of colour mixing: additive and subtractive. With additive mixing, different light wavelengths are mixed together to create different colours, and when added together the result is white light. However, the opposite happens when paints are mixed. Since each pigment only reflects back to the eye a proportion of the available light, when more and more pigments are mixed together, more and more wavelengths are subtracted. Mix enough together and very little of the visible spectrum is reflected, so we will perceive the mixture to be black.” '
• 'For me, the high point of the Monochrome exhibition was the penultimate room. In the catalogue, which I rifled through on the tube back to Elephant and Castle, this section was called “Abstraction in Black and White” and included knee-trembling paintings by Kazmir Malevich, Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Bridget Riley, Gerhard Richter, Frank Stella, and Jasper Johns. Richter’s triptych Grey Mirror - 765 (1992) was a fine, and subtle, example of a very-much-intended blending blending of the abstract with the figurative.' The materials listed are “Pigment on glass” in the sort of equivocal dark grey that would have delighted Uncle Bert in his studio workshops. When your eyes have become accustomed to the almost-blackness, you then become aware of the rest of the gallery reflected in its surface. Your mind knows that what you are looking at is two dark, rectangular panels. But your eye and brain picks up (and is meant to) reflections of other canvases, and the geometry of the room itself. This is not a chance occurrence, the artist knew exactly what he is doing with the subtleties of reflection, just as Melbourne artist Aaron Martin’s work does in his highly-reflective monochrome paintings. Both artists set up a polarity between “mind” and “brain”, that reminds me of the old adage, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” '
• 'Charles says “The birth of modernist architecture paralleled that of the birth of abstraction…Both had that strong reductionist quality. Compare Malevich’s Black Square to Corbusier’s Villa Savoy, one black and one white, but both representing the utopian ideal of a new world created by man - a world of simplicity, honesty, transparency, equity. The sinister reaction to this utopian ideal was the Nazi concept of the master race, which by definition was all about polarities. Black and white figured strongly in the symbols by which they represented themselves, such as the black SS uniforms and the Nazi flag.” More polarities.'
• '“That’s right,” Leah enthuses. “Our love of black and white in artworks, and all the polarities this creates and references, crept up on us… Setting up the exhibition has forced us to reflect on what were the prompts for the large number of black and white works. No definitive answers emerged, but they do suggest that the black and white works were deeply affecting and have allowed us to engage with the purity of the form. After all, the first colours we respond to as babies are black and white. Bizarrely, these black and white works are somehow enriched with the colour of our individual emotions and feelings.” '
• '“By creativity,” Charles becomes ever more precise, as our coffees are carefully placed in front of us by a Korean waitress, “what I’m talking about is the capacity of humans to take an abstract idea and realize it in a physical form that can be experienced by others. So, it covers architecture, art, technology, music, literature and whatever is made by humans in the world we live in. It doesn’t refer to the sort of conversations you and I have had before about birds’ nests and beavers’ dams.”'
• Charles says, '“All the works in the exhibition are abstract. The way the works will be curated is to group them along compositional structures- architectonic, lines, dots and circles, patterns, orthogonal blocks and fractals - each a phrasing within the language of abstraction.”'
• Charles also attaches some stunning images of the install in progress, and the wall text which, applied in the shape of a sphere, presents a series of well known polarities under the rubric: 

RICH POOR

LEFT RIGHT

RELIGIOUS SECULAR

LIBERAL CONSERVATIVE

PLURALIST FUNDAMENTALIST

ENVIRONMENTALIST CONSUMERIST

EAST WEST

SOCIALIST CAPITALIST