Sketches on the Absence of Mortality or Immortality (2018)

Anthony (Tony) Bond OAM

213x137cm, Oil on Linen

A multi-media portrait (painting and video) of eminent curator and writer Tony Bond

Blue Mountains Cultural Centre    3 February - 18 March, 2018

A work exploring one of Tony Bond’s key curatorial themes, and a place where he and I intersect - the active participant/embodied experience and meditation/meditative states.  Moving away from the notion of artist and artwork as objective, detached, universal phenomena, Bond has always sought to highlight an art that explores and understands the active role played by an involved 'experiencer', not so much by a detached 'viewer', an art that also relies less narrowly on 'representation' alone.  Here also, the lines become blurred as to what the actual nature of the 'artist' is.  So much so that this 'experiencer' is actually, in equal regard, the artist - through their unique operation of a work and what they bring to it, and ultimately representative of the only true way we experience phenomena, from nowhere else but our own mind.  It is for this reason that this work avoids a single viewpoint, combining a reference to the grand portraiture of the past (frozen in time), with traces of actual experience referenced within the video, but no more 'real' than the painting.  It is Lynn's contention that when we cross this threshold into experience, we naturally and unavoidably forego the entire apparatus of the objective and the universal, and therefore neither Mortality nor Immortality has any foundation whatsoever.  This work also attempts to avoid the completion, neatness and finality of a finished work concerned primarily with 'representation'. It combines two 'sketches' of differing viewpoints, neither one being more truthful than the other, with the intention of opening up the possibility (for the viewer/experiencer) of this constant and unfolding state of flux.
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