Looking at contemporary and historical practice as an increasingly important contribution to the Australian cultural, political and economic scene

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NIKOLAUS LANG

Conceptual Framework: Artwork

“Ochre and Sand: Dedicated to the Vanished Tribes of the Flinders Ranges and Adelaide Area” DATE: 1987 SIZE: 6 X 600 X 504 cm.

This is an installation deigned to be set upon the floor so that an audience can walk up to and around it in close proximity. It consists of many conical mounds of brightly coloured natural ground pigments collected from the Australian desert and arranged on pristine pieces of fine white art paper. Lang references both the art of the indigenous peoples of this landscape and the landscape itself challenging European conceptions of this landscape as monotonous and mundane.

Conceptual Framework: Artist

Nikolaus Lang is a contemporary German artist who studied at a Munich Art School in the1960’s during the times of Minimalism, Land Art, and Ecology Art. As a child he was interested in history and archaeology, and as a 12 year old, buried bones in his backyard so he could unearth and document them like an archaeological dig. In the 1970s he was one of the many artists who began to employ social artifacts in their work. He laid out rusting spoons and crumbling documents, for example, in carefully constructed drawers so as to recall a peasant family that had perished. One of the first ”field researchers” Nikolaus Lang, in the 1970s made extended journeys to the far corners of the globe, collecting things he found en route: objects from nature as well as relics of our modern throwaway society. Like an archaeologist, Lang charted his finds and painstakingly noted their place of discovery and state. His interest is thus divided equally between the dichotomy of nature and technological progress and the conflict between different cultural systems.

Conceptual Framework: World

In our contemporary, urban, western world, dominated by the material, there is a deep-seated and widely held need for our daily lives to be enriched, as for so many conventional religions and doctrinaire faiths fail to provide spiritual sustenance. The lack, in the modern world, of effective and meaningful ritual, of true communal sharing, of a unified energy and a common aim has created in many a real need to discover other means of inner nourishment and fulfillment. Artists have traditionally been seen as capable of linking the sacred and its representation for broader understanding, and even though the sacred no longer has the same fixed meanings and is indeed harder than ever to define, this search remains a necessary function of the creative spirit. Lang sees himself as one of these links between the material and the spiritual worlds.

Artmaking Practice: Ideas

Lang is interested in the opposite to art - that is, nature. He sees humankind as inextricably connected and one with nature. His artworks are installations in which Lang attempts to connect the prehistory of a place with the present, to show the continuities and flux of nature through time. To do this he walks through the landscape, gazing at it and collecting natural materials from the places he journeys through. When this artmaking takes place in Europe, Lang chooses areas where the distant past and the present intersect e.g. prehistoric caves at Lascaux or ancient Etruscan tomb wall paintings. On visits to Australia in 1979 and 1986 Lang discovered the art and culture of Australian Aborigines and was taken by the complete way that the material and the spiritual worlds were interwoven. He based his installation for the Sydney Biennales of 1979 and 1987 on this discovery. He succeeds in conveying the excitement of the materials he discovers, which in their preparation and presentation come to be loaded with metaphors. This is a country of extremes, of discontinuity; it lacks equilibrium and veers between feast and famine, boom and bust, drought and deluge, between enlightenment and myopia; its attitude towards and treatment of the original inhabitants oscillates accordingly.

Artmaking Practice: Action

In his European installations, Lang collects such things as found flint tools with which to make wooden implements or dead animal skins and feathers to make cloaks or boots. In the Australian installation he collected many different coloured sands, earth and rocks from the Australian desert, the same materials used by Aboriginal people in their traditional artmaking. He was especially interested in the glistening “Dingo’s blood” ochre which occurs in the Flinders Ranges and was once a prized item of Aboriginal trade throughout Australia. He ground many of these natural materials into powder form - the earth pigments of Aboriginal art. Small mounds of powdered ochres in many shades of pink and red, each shaped into a pointed cone, were placed on large, white sheets of art paper in a huge grid on the floor of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the centre of the grid were placed the deposits from which the pigments had been ground.

Lang's Australian projects have to do with the perceptibility of colour. He has set up complicated apparatuses in Australian quarries to collect variously coloured sands which he then adheres to cotton fabric. The technical quality of these works is high with a poetic quality. More enigmatic are those works that present isolated groups of pigments and colours as in one which featured 55 white porcelain plates filled to the edge with variously hued substances or as in “Ochre and Sand: Dedicated to the Vanished Tribes of the Flinders Ranges and Adelaide Area” where he places the conical mounds of ground pigment on a grid of white paper on the floor.

Conceptual Framework: Audience

Lang’s works are experienced by the audience as they walk around the installation as traces of the landscape, traces of the Aboriginal artists and their culture and the reality of the found objects from nature which these artists used to make their artworks. The artist has used a conceptual approach. The concept which underpins the artwork is more important than the artwork itself.

Critical Analysis using the Postmodern Frame:
“Ochre and Sand: Dedicated to the Vanished Tribes of the Flinders Range and Adelaide Area” is a Postmodern artwork. Lang is an artist who questions mainstream values and beliefs, especially about art. Many of his artworks take the form of installations so that he experiments with new modes of art and new modes of communication through his art. With his nature-based artworks, Lang interrogates the purposes of art in a contemporary, media-driven world. He also questions the values of art by using materials which are not traditionally associated with artmaking. Because of the ephemeral nature of some of his artworks he also challenges the notion that artworks must be permanent and precious. He is influenced by Aboriginal art but chooses to deconstruct it rather than to appropriate its images and forms.