Art against itself: Elizabeth Newman at CAST Gallery

‘Art is a practice of writing, but a writing that always fails: this shows us that there is still something to be written even when one had thought that everything had already been written.’

The assertion that art ‘always fails’ stems from the conviction that there is a division in our knowledge of the world, not between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ but between standard terms like these and our ability to claim the freedom to reject them. The habitual patterns we use to construct a world and our place in it create reassuring repetition based on the logic of making equivalences between things and between people. Elizabeth Newman’s practice sits uneasily with such logic. There are ulterior philosophic and moral concerns at stake, beyond ‘finished’ art objects, that are about not overlooking difference for likeness; not accepting that the world is just the way it is but realising that it could have been, could be, otherwise.

Newman is acutely aware of the compromises that a specific discipline can impose on you and how an artist’s ‘voice’ can easily become subsumed by institutional interests. Spurning the typical professional model, she gave up a successful art practice as a painter in 1992 to pursue a career in psychoanalysis. The resumption of her art practice in 2001 Untitled 2007. Photograph courtesy and copyright of CASTreveals a distillation of influences from Minimalist inspired abstraction and psychoanalysis. More importantly though, Newman’s recent work shows a healthy disrespect for the trappings of conventional art practice, providing a deliberate critique of the weakened capacity of current contemporary art practice to inspire ways of imagining an alternative social order.

A tactic of resistance is evident in the disconcerting silence and bareness of the work in this exhibition. Aesthetic and conceptual assumptions become fazed by a jumble of unresolved categories; amateur/DIY practices, art history and décor conflate in a way that lends a quietly humorous if rather dubious art status to these objects. This condition of uncertainty throws us back onto our own resources; volition, active or passive, comes to the fore. As distinct from art objects as containers of knowledge, Newman creates a void within them for the unfolding possibility of subjectivity – “….a human being produces, not objects, or not only objects, but subjectivity.” We are complicit in its generation or potential subjugation to dominant beliefs. Driven by a politics of the personal the artist’s work guides us towards the possible construction of human freedom through an attempt to safeguard “…the ‘absolute difference’ that each person is.”

Newman’s meticulous use of materials refers back to her earlier abstract paintings and perhaps to the formal and conceptual divisions that have entered into the rarefied, often idealised, world of Modernist abstraction. The use of colour and form as transcendent elements are always dogged by their particular physicality; even in an attempt to meld the split between universality and contextual uniqueness, between the institution and the personal, who can say where the doubling or standardisation of codes end and contingent perception begins? There’s a cruel sense of being trapped (particular experience being made invisible) by this conundrum. Thoughts and emotions are either identified (therefore generalised) or not, in which case they have no name or expression. As convention, then, art can only cover over or hide such a void.

Untitled 2007. Photograph courtesy and copyright CAST

Art is used against itself in Newman’s work in order to articulate this void, this ‘nothing to say’. In her own writing Newman refers to Heidegger’s analogy of the vase (used by Lacan to illustrate the emptiness at the centre of the human condition) that describes it as establishing “… a void only after the vase exists….” Silent to generalities this void can never be filled or defined in terms of presence. It does however allow an opening for collaboration between the artist and the viewer; a provisional space “…a call for the subject to come into being….” In her optimistic view of this void Newman’s materials imply an enfolding of it that enables her to be a maker in the realm of art but not of it.

The Unprecedented Dark Light of the New Letters, Elizabeth Newman, CAST Gallery, 1-30 March, 2008

Philip Watkins is a contemporary arts writer and curator. He
writes for national journals such as Artlink, Photofile and Australian
Art Collector. He is currently Exhibitions Officer at CAST, Hobart.

Works Cited

Newman, Elizabeth. Lizzy Newman, Work 2001 – 2005. p 4. Self published 2005
McKenzie Rob. ‘You’re Still Making History that No-one Else Knew How To, an interview with Lizzy Newman’. From catalogue for Imagine, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Dec 2005