Camouflage Self-Portrait (A Man Like Mr Kurtz)
Cibatrans mounted in light box
101.7 x 101.7 cms
1994
A portrait of the Artist from the neck up with camouflage paint.
Exhibitions
Essays
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This Is Not A Story About The Military - Hardy Blechman
SHOW
This Is Not A Story About The Military - Hardy Blechman
In 1909, when the Victorian naturalist and painter Abbott H. Thayer published his observations about concealment in nature, it’s fairly certain he had no idea what he was starting. Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom was the first comprehensive catalogue of the many camouflage techniques employed in the natural world, and Thayer argued that nature was acting as an artist, creating optical effects with colour and light. On this basis he suggested that his study belonged in the realm of the artist as well as the naturalist. His thesis coincided with the birth of Cubism and, interestingly, with the emergence of Gestalt perceptual psychology. ‘Gestalt’ means ‘shape’ or ‘figure’, and its theorists sought to explore how the brain organizes and interprets visual material through form, context, spatial proximity and patterning. Perhaps unsurprisingly the primary concepts of Gestalt gained some credence within the art world, in particular with Klee and Kandinsky a decade or so later.
But it wasn’t just in the art world that significant changes were taking place. The early twentieth century saw a seismic shift in the visual techniques employed by military forces worldwide, primarily as a result of the development of longer range and more -
Kurtz Text - Michael Holden
SHOW
Kurtz Text - Michael Holden
One might imagine that as Joseph Conrad typed together the character of Mr Kurtz at the back end of the 1800’s he had no notion that his equatorial phantom, the diseased and mythic antagonist of what would become his best known book, would survive and even thrive as one of the great enigmatic figures of all time. But I like to think he knew what he was doing; that he had seen enough of human nature and the colonial process to understand precisely how our species’ instincts would unfold and repeat themselves over the coming century. And from that knowledge he forged a character whose fall from optimism into fevered anarchy could survive a hundred years of academic study and even the great mutating lens of Hollywood and continue to beguile. I think he knew that we had lived in fear of Kurtz-within us and without us-long before his book was begun, and he knew that fear would abide.
For those without the inclination to navigate the 96 pages of Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness the abiding image of Kurtz will be that of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now; skulking in the shadows to hide his own obesity rather