Artists' Artists: Huma Bhabha

BARNETT NEWMAN
United States of America, 1905–1970
Broken obelisk 1963/1967/2005

This monumental sculptural work by Barnett Newman has always made a profound impression on me, wherever I have seen it installed. It allows itself to be absorbed into the landscape in which it is placed, whether the sculpture gardens of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s modernist Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin or the wilderness of Storm King Art Center Sculpture Park in the Hudson Valley. This monument to rebirth and life affirms the importance of a certain kind of focus that an artist like Newman had, where he could delve into ancient art history and pick two significant forms — the pyramid and the obelisk — and restructure them to become something entirely different. It is a kind of reverse appropriation. I also appreciate how this sculpture critiques Western cultures for using pirated artefacts, like the obelisks of ancient Egypt, as imperialist trophies.

ANCESTOR, PEOPLE NOT RECORDED
Arnhem Land
Hunter and emu pre 1914

This work is extraordinary for its ability to depict a violent scene with such beauty and such a sophisticated understanding of colour, to keep everything within a certain tonal range, using the bark support as a base colour that fills in areas to create mass. I admire the unknown artist’s use of graphic line, the strange composition in which the emu performs a sort of danse macabre, and the repetition of phallic shapes — the hunter’s penis, the emu’s leg, the spears and other weapons — all executed with such descriptive detail. I was interested to learn that the cross‑hatching on the hunter’s body, which may be hair or ceremonial markings, is particular to Arnhem Land bark paintings and demonstrates the artist’s humility in the presence of the power of the ancient landscape. Bark paintings, which are all about figure‑ground relationships and tend to represent daily chores and life, are seemingly the opposite of the abstract dream paintings that were being done by other First Nation artists at the time.

EMILY KAM KNGWARRAY
Anmatyerr people
Yam awely 1995

Coming from a desert landscape in Pakistan, I respond to the idea of the desert as the birthplace for Emily Kam Kngwarray’s amazing paintings. Despite often being referred to as harsh, desert environments encourage creative flow, enabling us to see what others can’t imagine in a landscape that is alive with an almost‑radioactive colour palette. The desert is all about seeing.

Originating in decorative and figurative ceremonial art, Kngwarray’s paintings might appear entirely abstract to the uneducated eye. In fact, these works draw on the Dreamings and their marks contain a narrative power that refers to the life‑giving sources of this ancient landscape.

Yam awely is like a topographical map of the land overlapped by an aerial view of desert roads, or the threads of the brain as it travels during a dream. This painting gives the sense that the artist has looked at the night sky for thousands of years. Yam awely exists far beyond its ceremonial purpose: this is a one‑to‑one connection between the artist and the landscape.

ROBERT SMITHSON
United States of America, 1938–1973
Island project 1970

Originally a painter, Robert Smithson became known as a sculptor from 1964 and was central to the development of Land or Earth art. Unlike his best‑known work, Spiral jetty 1970, the installation proposed in Island project was never realised. Envisaged for an island off the coast of Maine, it blends and balances opposing forces, contrasting the precision of the spiralling stairs against the natural spire, the downward spike of the lantern against the upthrust rocky outcrop, the square tower against the gently rounded island. This drawing, and others by Smithson from the same period, show fantastic interactions between human constructions and nature, and although spiral walkways are a recurring theme, they are always distinctly unnatural interventions in the landscape, rather than the organic harmony intrinsic to Spiral jetty. In each case, however, they invite human interaction with the environment, without any environmentalist concern for nature.

Smithson’s staircase leading to the sky — or to nowhere — brings to mind Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The tower of Babel c 1563. The monstrous intervention of the stairs, which function like limbs or tentacles, evokes a fascination with old pirate movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn 1936. In the same year that he drew Island project, Smithson also devised Floating Island 1970 — another unrealised project in which a tugboat would tow a vessel filled with trees and plants around Manhattan. Island project, however, lacks such conceptual context: it’s an imaginary island full of crystals and gems from Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo 1844–46. Smithson’s beautiful pencil work details how the smoke billowing from the lantern creates the perfect background clouds. To me, Island project is almost nostalgic — reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s pen and ink landscapes — yet surreal, with its stairs emerging organically from the water and coiling round and round, seemingly without end.

This story was first published in The Annual 2022.