The Samstag effect - CACSA: Contemporary Art Centre of South

The Samstag effect
Catherine Speck
American artist Gordon Samstag was appointed to the staff of the South
Australian School of Art in the 1960s to bring an international perspective to
a provincial outfit. He was not the only one: a raft of others were appointed
in those years, including Canadian painter Jo Caddy, Scottish potter Alex
Leckie, fellow American Charles Reddington, European printmakers Karen
Schepers and Anton Holzner, and painter Udo Sellbach. Samstag only
stayed a decade or so, teaching painting from 1961-1972, and he is best
remembered for the pool parties he used to throw for his painting students
complete with drink waiters. But the experience of living and working in
Australia, away from the cultural centre of New York, set in train a bequest
based on the modernist vision of travel and expatriatism, and underpinned
by the American tradition of philanthrophy.
In the early 1930s Samstag benefited from the generosity of Louis
Comfort Tiffany. Tiffany awarded scholarships to up-and-coming young
artists for live-in summer schools at his residence, Laurelton Hall, at Oyster
Bay on Long Island. This select group of Tiffany scholarship holders was
small, usually about fifteen, and visiting artists gave the scholarship holders
critiques.1 Samstag was schooled then in the American regional style of
magic realism. But this was not Gordon Samstag’s only award, he had
earlier received a Pulitzer Travelling scholarship which funded his time in
Paris at the Academie Calarossi in the late 1920s. This move was an almost
obligatory step for young Americans before the First World War, and as
Alexander Calder said, “Paris seemed the place to go, on all accounts of
practically everyone who had been there, and I decided I would also like to
go.”2
Samstag therefore was only too aware of the need for artists to
travel, and how necessary it was to go abroad “to free oneself of the burden
and constraints of a culture, a social milieu, a family history”; and that a time
of temporary exile, “imposes a sense of otherness” that engenders “energy
and creativity”.3 He experienced the high modernist engagement with
internationalism that Raymond Williams has talked about as “the elements
of strangeness and distance, indeed alienation”, which engender innovation
for artists, writers and thinkers where “the only commonality available to
them [was] a community of the medium; of their own practices”.4
That expatriate experience, funded by Pulitzer, was Samstag’s
own life story. It created the backdrop to the scholarship scheme he devised
as his lasting contribution to what he perceived as the isolation of young
Australian artists. He was quite precise about how it would work. His Will
set out that: “It is my intent that the income of the Fine Arts Trust shall be
made available to fine arts students from Australia so that they may study
and develop their artistic capacities, skills and talents in New York and its
vicinity, or elsewhere outside of Australia.” He wanted artists to travel and
study, for an extended period of a year, not in short-term residencies, and his
bequest would fund tuition fees, airfares and a generous stipend.
While that modernist vision of expatriatism and travel has been
overtaken by globalism in all its forms, and a much greater engagement
with artists in our own Asian neighborhood, one element has remained
constant—our geographical distance from Europe and America. The much
prized Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship open
to visual arts graduates of five years standing has become an institutionalised
form of globalism. It has been operating since 1993, there are now one
hundred and twenty-six recipients, and the alumni point to some very
astute choices by the judges, including Daniel von Sturmer, Callum Morton
and Shaun Gladwell who went on to exhibit at the Venice Biennale (von
Sturmer and Morton in 2007 and Gladwell in 2009), Kristian Burford, Julie
Gough and numerous other success stories. Little wonder Roslyn Oxley
refers glowingly to the Samstag program as the greatest initiative that has
happened to Australian art.
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Writer and art critic Louise Martin Chew described in 2008 the line-up each
year of the scholarship recipients as representative of “the temperature of
contemporary art in Australia”.5 But what of the South Australian winners?
One scholarship per year, according to Samstag’s vision, goes to a graduate
of the South Australian School of Art, sometime more, and to date twentytwo percent of all recipients are from South Australia (the largest number,
thirty-four percent going to artists from the more populous New South
Wales). Some years after the scholarships were underway, Ross Wolfe
as program director, predicted it would be difficult, if not impossible, to
measure the success of the Samstag scholarships. He noted, “their future
cultural impact is inestimable”.6 But is Adelaide, as the home and host of
the program, and its wider cultural horizon unaffected? And is it so difficult
to measure success?
Internationalism is now mainstream cultural practice, and the
Samstag scholarship opens up access to major networks and curators. Julie
Henderson of the class of 2004 is one of many who had her work ‘noticed’ in
this way. She recalls that, “because I was involved with the Glasgow School
of Art, I was given the opportunity to put my work forward to curators over
there and a pair of Swedish curators chose my work to go on and exhibit
in Stockholm, and that exhibition Syncopations, showcasing works from
institutions in the UK, went to Wetterling Gallery in Sweden”.7 Following
her year in Glasgow, she spent another six months in Switzerland before
returning. Others have not returned, and Michael Kutchbach, Kristian
Burford and Tracy Cornish are just three of those working post-Samstag
in major international centres, but who maintain contact. While these are
Samstag exports for the immediate future, and that is to be expected, many
others once back in Australia continue their exhibiting profiles overseas,
while also showing in Australia.
There are now twenty-eight Samstag scholars harking from
Adelaide. Where are they, what are they doing, what profile do they
have, and is Samstag’s philanthropic gesture impinging on Adelaide’s
cultural scene? Without descending into parochialism, the question of
the ‘boomerang effect’ is worth exploring. The answer is both interesting
and complex. Three are now in influential positions as Studio Heads at
the School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia
—Julie Henderson is Head of Sculpture and Installation, and Paul Hoban
is Head of Painting. Nicholas Folland is Head of Contemporary Studies
at the Adelaide Central School of Art. Henderson and Folland each speak
of the “confidence” the scholarship experience gave them as artists, which
flows into their teaching. Henderson says because her work was affirmed
overseas, she brought back “extra confidence”. She commented that;
the style of work I make is not so common in Adelaide,
so there was lots of positive feedback about the work I’m
making which is more familiar to English audiences—I
didn’t realise I was doing that—but that was the sense I got
of it—that I had extra cachet, and I didn’t realise it living
here.8
Nicholas Folland too speaks of confidence stemming from the Samstag
scholarship, but more than that it is the authority that has come with it:
“It validates what you do, people responded differently to what I put out
there, they came to my work with faith. For a lot of people the difficultly is
finding an audience, the Samstag immediately built that audience, whether
they knew what I did or not, they knew that I had received the Samstag and
they gave my work consideration and I’m sure that has influenced every
opportunity I’ve received since then.” Also the knowledge gained from his
time overseas seeps into his teaching, and how there are “lots of benefits
to students in knowing about that the world out there. It helps to know
the way the world is responding to what people are putting out there, and
the way people are articulating their ideas and the things that they want to
communicate.” But like Gordon Samstag, he detects that “in Adelaide there
are a lots of students and artists [even now] who don’t seem to get out”.9
Paul Hoban, whose work explores the making of fundamental forms on
the surface (skin) of paint, returned to Adelaide and is now Studio Head of
Painting. He speaks in mixed tones of his Samstag experience at the Royal
College of Art, London, where foreign students, placed in the sculpture
studios at Battersea, had rare meetings with their studio tutors. But this
had the singular advantage of leaving him to his own devices. It gave him
time to mull over ideas, and his research-led practice has come out of this
experience. The scholarship also changed his life in a fundamental way; he
can now be experimental in his painting, rather than having to produce a
less realised body of work in order to survive.10
Darren Siwes speaks of the significant changes wrought on his
practice stemming from his time at Chelsea College of Art and Design,
London, and more broadly from his brush with class in Britain, and in turn
how that experience keeps ricocheting through his subsequent photographic
series. He commented recently,
I could not have imagined at the time where my work
was going to head, and how influential on my practice it
was going to be. It was a significant catalyst in shaping
the direction of my art today and the strength of it is just
continuing on. The value I got out of it was immense and…
it has got to be one of the most important things that has
shaped my art and my future.11
His current series Mulaga Gudgerie, which extends his Oz Omnium et Rex
Regina series, presents an indigenous Australian Queen as Head of State.
In his heavily painted Aboriginal models, he is deliberately blurring the
boundaries between what is real and what is surreal, and what is black and
what is white. Beneath these dramatic effects, the issue of an indigenous
head of Australia is not an ‘if’, but ‘when’. Deborah Paauwe too talks of the
inestimable impact on her career of receiving a scholarship, which meant
she could engage in further study “in the stimulating and challenging
atmosphere of the London art world”. There she said, she “was forced (most
agreeably) into pushing my work into at first, uncomfortable but ultimately
richly rewarding territory”.12 Her base, also the Chelsea School of Art,
attracted visiting influential artists every week who gave public lectures
and one-on-one tutorials, and since returning the esteem flowing from the
scholarship has brought her numerous invitations to participate in local,
national and international exhibitions.
Others also speak of the changes wrought on their practice by the
experience. Sarah Crowest of the class of 2007, and now back in Australia,
says she “was looking for an experience that would shift my thinking and
practice, blow apart my habitual ways of working and give me time to think
and research without predetermined outcomes”. She wanted “to place
myself in a situation that was unpredictable”, so she settled on Maumaus
Escola des Artes Visuais in Lisbon, Portugal, which at that time had no
website and was somehow “very mysterious”. It played host to a diverse
and fascinating range of visiting artists and theorists from all over the
world. She says the experience was both “wonderful and terrible” and how,
…being alone and at large in a strange city for a year
without my usual home comforts and distractions, gave me
extra time to reflect and see starkly the real nature of my
practice… I had been working with video and planned to
explore that further, but was stripped of the performative
sculptural processes that had been my focus… I was
opened up to all kinds of random but often old European
influences. I somehow felt I gained permission to be old
fashioned and use ‘proper’ art materials. I used, for the first
time, large, deluxe sheets of watercolour papers and inks
and old lithographs for collage. I had many works framed
for exhibition (another first in my practice). Going away for
a year and coming back enabled two totally fresh starts to
my practice unencumbered by my habitually accumulated
studio detritus. These breaks and spaces (both physical and
psychological) are crucial for keeping the mind and practice
agile.13
While there has been limited probing of the actual process of change by the
Samstag program, there has been some in-house showcasing in Adelaide of
what their artists have produced post-scholarship. The aptly titled Kindle
and Swag travelling exhibition of November 2004 looked at the new work of
seven alumni: Kristian Burford, Nicholas Folland, Timothy Horn, Deborah
Paauwe, Nike Savvas, Megan Walch and Anne Wallace; as did their
Colliding Worlds of May 2009, which featured the new work by Pia Borg,
Nicholas Folland, Hayden Flower and Shaun Kirby, along with “extras”
—Anna Platten and Patricia Piccinini.14
The most innovative profiling by far of the Samstag program in
Adelaide was their Disclosures series which took place at monthly intervals
between September 2003 and April 2004. These one-day events, staged in
public spaces, were premised on the idea of surprise, and the six artists
involved, all South Australian alumni, worked in a medium outside that
of their usual practice. Deborah Paauwe’s Once in a lullaby consisted of a
house made completely of balloons for a site in Elder Park in 2003. It was
an ostensibly playful, tangible construction; but it was neither, and alluded
to the darker side of childhood stories and games. Six artists, in all, were
involved in these monthly events, the series was very well received, and at
the time Ross Wolfe commented they were staged to give something back
to South Australia. The most recent manifestation of this ethos is Simon
Terrill’s Crowd Theory, one in his ongoing photographic studies of how
people occupy space, and for this work it was Adelaide’s Victoria Square/
Tarndanyangga on an evening in February this year. Terrill is from the class
of 2009.
For another vantage point of how Samstag scholars might be affecting
South Australia’s cultural landscape we need to look beyond in-house
exhibitions and events to even more high profile indicators. Sarah Thomas’
Chemistry: Art in South Australia 1990-2000, staged in 2000 by the
Art Gallery of South Australia featured five recent Samstag scholars: Angela
Valamanesh, Paul Hoban, Shaun Kirby, Zhong Chen and Deborah Paauwe.
The scholarship had been going for seven years by then. A better measure
though is the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, which aimed at “showing
some of the most interesting, vital and challenging aspects of recent art”15.
The brief from 1998 on is always to include senior as well as younger artists,
although the commissioning curators inevitably apply a filter due to their
self-selected theme and biases in terms of who is ‘in’. These qualifications
aside, there is a strong crossover between the scholarship and the Adelaide
Biennial. It commenced in 1990, the scholarship in 1993, and by 1998 in
All This and Heaven Too curated by Juliana Engberg and Ewen McDonald,
four scholars were included: Mehmet Adhil, Ruth Fazacklerly (both SAbased), Julie Gough and Anne Ooms. The 2000 Biennial Beyond the Pale,
curated by Brenda Croft, featured Rea and Darren Siwes (SA); Converge:
Where Art and Science Meet in 2002 bypassed Samstag alumni, while the
Contemporary Photo-Media curated in 2004 by Julie Robinson featured
Darren Siwes and Deborah Paauwe. Linda Michael’s 2006 Twenty First
Century Modern included ADS Donaldson and Daniel von Sturmer; while
Felicity Fenner’s 2008 Handle with Care again bypassed the alumni. Before
and After Science curated by Charlotte Day and Sarah Tutton in 2010
included Benjamin Armstrong, Callum Morton and Michelle Nikou (SA);
while 2012’s Parallel Collisions, curated by Natasha Bullock and Alexie
Glass-Cantor, had Nicholas Folland as the only SA Samstag recipient,
joined by earlier scholarship winners Shaun Gladwell and Marco Fussinato.
On that measure, the Samstag experience is an entrée for some, but not all,
in gaining selection in this South Australian survey of contemporary trends.
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The Contemporary Art Centre of SA’s CACSA Contemporary 2010:
The New New presented a wholly different profile of Samstag alumni.
That exhibition focused exclusively on South Australian contemporary
art, and included numerous scholars who made up twenty-three percent
of participants including Andrew Best, Monte Masi, Julie Henderson and
Bridget Currie. However, the picture changes with AGSA’s forthcoming
2013 exhibition Heartlands curated by Lisa Slade and Nici Cumpston, with
Angela Valamanesh being the sole scholar in their thematic vision of South
Australian visual culture relating to “land, heart and spirit”.
There has been a steep decline in the awarding of scholarships
since 2009. None were awarded that year due to a decision by the Trustees
to preserve the trust funds given the economic severity caused by the Global
Financial Crisis.16 Year-long scholarships recommenced in 2010, but given
the rising costs just two are awarded each year, one of which goes to a
South Australian artist. This in itself might suggest that aspiring artists
with an eye to the future should move to and study in South Australia to
be eligible. The University of SA though has been careless it would seem
in not maintaining the nomenclature of the “South Australian School of
Art” as a current Art School, rather than as an historic entity on its website.
This is an issue since Gordon Samstag’s Will stipulates the scholarships will
be transferred to New York’s School of Design should the SA School of Art
cease to exist. This straightforward naming issue should be rectified on the
new School of Art, Architecture and Design’s website.
The cultural penetration of recent Samstag scholars to South
Australian art is noticeably declining as there are now fewer of them.
Fontanelle, a recent gallery addition to the domestic scene, has staged nine
exhibitions since April 2012, and only two group shows have included
alumni. For the AEAF, the picture is similar. Julie Henderson held a
solo exhibition A Universe of Small Truths in 2012, which extended her
Glasgow work, in which her “assemblage functions across mediums
and like drawing, involves an immediate and sensory probing of spatial
and therefore also durational fields”.17 Nicholas Folland also held a solo
exhibition there in 2005 with Doldrum. Other alumni at the AEAF have been
in group exhibitions: Nicolas Folland in a Build me a City, 2012; Matthys
Gerber in Painthing, 2010; Sarah Crowest, To Give Me to Time (Adelaide
and Mildura sites), 2010, and Angela Valamanesh, Duetto, 2010. The picture
at the CACSA improves a little and alumni have been consistently
programmed in group projects—Folland and Hoban were in Mentor
Mentored2 in 2006, Crowest in Mentor Mentored3 in 2007, and Tim Sterling
in Mentor Mentored4 in 2008. Christine Collins, Sally-Ann Rowland and
Andrew Best were in Roadmovies in 2009, while Collins was included
in two 2012 group projects Ibidem and CACSA Contemporary 2012:
New South Australian Art, the former also presenting Craige Andrae.
The aforementioned CACSA Contemporary 2010: The New New presented
Andrae, Best, Collins, Folland, Henderson, Hoban, Masi, Paauwe, Rowland,
Siwes and Valamanesh. Both Paul Hoban and Shaun Gladwell have had
solo exhibitions: Gladwell in 2008 in In a Station of the Metro, and Hoban in
2009 with Paintskin (plus a monograph). Greenaway Art Gallery and Hugo
Michell stage frequent solo exhibitions of Samstag alumni.
The Samstag scholarship is a precious gift to South Australia.
Sarah Crowest is one of many who articulated this as “something special
for Adelaide. I always felt it to be something extraordinary for the aspiring
students and artists of Adelaide... possibly their sole advantage over
interstate colleagues”.18 It would be strategic for the Samstag program to
make much more of the process of the change incurred by the scholarship
experience—Nicholas Folland is one of several who speaks of changes to his
practice he just didn’t expect. In 1999, he was faced with a totally new form
of a constructed landscape in the Netherlands that caused him to reinvent
his practice while there, and this continues. His recent sculptural incursion,
Untilted (Jump-up), in AGSA’s Elder Wing as a part of Parallel Collisions
extended his exploration of the material language of domestic objects, and
their re-making in the landscape. His commission involved working in a
gallery space, which, by its display, already prompts viewers to question
Page 134 top: Darren Siwes, Jingli Kwin (from ‘Mulaga Gudjerie’ series), 2013
bottom: Darren Siwes, Gudjerie Kwin (from ‘Mulaga Gudjerie’ series), 2013
Photos courtesy the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
Opposite: Nicholas Folland, Untitled (Jump-up), (installation view Parallel Collisions:
2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia), 2012
Photo courtesy the artist and Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane
ideas of settlement. Folland extended this ethos via his installation of
domestic glassware transported to the antipodes, and in playing with that
antipodean inversion, the work was hung mostly sideways and upside
down. More than that, the glassware itself offered a fractured view of other
portrayals hung in that contested space of settlement.
Adelaide-based poet and art critic Ken Bolton predicted in 2004
that the Samstag group would be distinctive for their “originality and
promise”, and that they will go on to shape art history.19 While seeing out
that prediction requires long term vision, it would serve contemporary
culture if that process of change could be better explored. Certainly some of
the South Australian cohort imbue local culture with that change. This is an
extension of the Samstag brief, but one well worth exploring.
Notes
1
Alice Cooney Freylinghusen, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate,
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006: 94; ‘Exhibition of art will open Sunday’, Buffalo Evening
News, 24 April 1931; ‘Show by Oyster Bay Group’, 1931 (source unknown); ‘American-Anderson Galleries’,
Art News, 7 November 1931: Edna Reindel file, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC
2
Alexander Calder, Autobiography with Pictures, New York: Pantheon, 1966: 76
3
Sophie Levy (ed.), American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939: A Transatlantic Avant-Garde, Giverny, University
of California Press, Musée d’Art Américain, 2003: 16
4
Raymond Williams, ‘The metropolis and the emergence of modernism’, in Peter Brooker (ed.), Modernism/
Postmodernism, London: Longman, 1992: 91-92
5
Louise Martin-Chew, ‘Alternative realties’, The Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts
Scholarships, University of South Australia, 2008, np
6
Ross Wolfe, ‘Foreward’, The Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships, University of
South Australia, 2004, np
7
Julie Henderson interviewed by the author, 17 April 2013
8
ibid.
9
Nicholas Folland interviewed by the author, 23 April 2013
10
Paul Hoban interviewed by the author, 22 April 2013
11
Darren Siwes interviewed by the author, 30 April 2013
12
Deborah Paauwe to the author, email 2 May 2013
13
Sarah Crowest to the author, email 27 April 2013
14
See Wendy Walker, ‘The Samstag Legacy: The man, the program and the art’, Art Monthly Australia,
April 2005
15
Daniel Thomas, ‘Foreward’, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: 1990, Art Gallery Board of South
Australia, 1990: 1; Ron Radford, ‘Foreward’, Beyond the Pale: Contemporary Indigenous Art, 2000 Biennial
of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2000: 7
16
‘Samstag scholarship moratorium’, www.unisa.edu.au/Samstag/news/april08.asp; accessed 28 April
2013
17
Julie Henderson, artist’s statement, www.aeaf.org.au/exhibitions/past.html
18
Sarah Crowest email, 27 April 2013
19
Ken Bolton, ‘New brew: export quality six pack’, The Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts
Scholarships, University of South Australia, 2004, np