Saturday 1 June 2002

Tim Zuck: Learning to Talk

The examination of personal identity is a fundamental part of the art school education today.  In the recent past, however, it was a considerable departure from the acceptable practise of contemporary art.  The 1960's and 70's were iconoclastic times – radically egalitarian, and, in their own way, puritanical.  Artists were exhorted to shun the literary, the symbolic, the expressive – anything that might distract the seeking gaze from the ineluctable existential present. The art world, in step with the rest of the world at the time, was in the thrall of the idea of social progress. Artists, critics and theorists were largely convinced that art was a remnant stage of history, destined to dematerialize into philosophy.  Personal identity, as an expressive value of art, in this context, was at best “bourgeois.”

The experience of the last twenty-five years has not refuted theories of progress.  But it has  shown progress to advance much more slowly than we had ever hoped or imagined.  And now, coexisting with this more sober understanding of progress is an older, cyclical notion of social experience. This understanding acknowledges art that is irrational, expressive, contingent, political.  Without blind faith in the future, artists may again look to the past for models, myths and symbols of experience outside of the modernist project.

This exhibition is a survey of paintings and drawings created by Tim Zuck over the past twenty-five years.  It is a body of work that began in a time of artistic crisis.  Zuck was moving away from the conceptual and serial art which had characterized his early career, and was attempting to formulate a personally expressive visual vocabulary.  Wanting to address subjects that were significant in his life he turned to painting and drawing as a means.  Having no formal academic training in either of these disciplines, he started from the beginning.  Not the beginning that one  finds in the first chapter of the “How to Draw” book – perspective, proportion and foreshortening – but further back, at that beginning, when a child picks up a pencil and, in a few strokes, describes a world.  This body of work charts the artist’s progress from elementary representations to increasingly complex images.  It is the uniquely traceable progress of a mature artist that mirrors the early acquisition of speech – the naming of objects, followed by the naming of actions, the creation of sentences followed by the construction of paragraphs. Thus, this exhibition has been entitled Learning To Talk.

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The compulsion to draw houses may be unique to children from the so-called nuclear families, for whom containment, separation and distinctiveness from the rest of the community defines the family.  At a certain age, around four or five it seems, children start to draw houses. It’s simple enough  to do –  make a box. A box has four sides, and fours sides make two spaces – inside and outside.  Then you add a door and a window, and a peak.  (The triangular peak must have significance because children tend to add it even if they live in a flat-roofed apartment building.)  A smoking chimney shows that the house is warm. A shining sun in the sky shows that this house is a good place to be.

In 1974 Tim Zuck was building a house for himself and his wife Robin, and wanting to express what this meant to him, chose to paint one.  It was a very simple house, drawn flatly with no perspective, and with a winding path leading up to the door.  It is hard not to think of children's art when looking at these early paintings by Zuck. He was starting all over again – intellectually, emotionally, artistically – and in this new  beginning found both a subject and style that was both child-like and at the same time also very adult.    

What is natural for a five year old is sometimes more difficult for a mature adult.  The expression of “home” has long been a source of visual kitsch, but Zuck managed in these early house paintings to articulate a very direct sense of being at home in the world without reverting to cliché or mock childishness.  More importantly the house paintings were not static, isolated essays, but rather the fundamental building blocks with which Zuck began to investigate the idea of home and the world around him.  He started with “the house” and moved to “the house in the world,” making reference to the specific place and geography.   The formerly centralized iconic image began to play a part in relational compositions. He contrasted the stable, five sided geometric house structure with four sided containers bursting with graphic chaos, as if to speak of what could, and what could not, be signalled graphically. And finally, he examined the idea of home as an erotic site.  

House, land.  House, land, water.  Land, water.  Land, woman. House, tree, cloud.  House, man, woman.   A lexicon of significant but singular presences, they begin to weave one into the other, and tell a story.  Zuck has spoken of the significant moment when an artist “finds his voice.”  It is hard here not to imagine that here we watch him finding his voice word by word and sentence by sentence.  Gradually the flat, schematic renderings give way to simple objects in perspectival space.  These he begins to define tentatively at first, and then more assuredly, until these abstract figures become singular objects.  

Surveying twenty years of Tim Zuck’s work one see ideas, feelings and things becoming material.  The spaces that surround his subjects have gradually filled with air – an air that seems evidence of the artist’s presence, physically, intellectually and emotionally.  Tentatively at first, then with greater assurance, he has occupied the spaces of his own life.  In this collection of work, we grow with the artist, watch him form the words and sentences, and learn to speak.