Imants TILLERS

Australian 1950–

In a review of An Australian Accent, the 1984 exhibition at P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York that featured the work of Mike Parr, Ken Unsworth and Imants Tillers, an American critic wrote that Tillers’s work

embodies what it means to be an Australian artist. This is not to say that he makes images of Australian subjects but that his methods reflect the artistic isolation of Australia. In Australia, great museums and artworks are in short supply, while art-world ideas are as current as the postal system allows.1

While somewhat overstating the reality of Australia’s physical and cultural isolation, this statement defines the essence of Tillers’s artistic project which, since the early 1980s, has seen him appropriate ‘second-hand’ images sourced from books, magazines and art reproductions, from the vast realm of high and low art. His paintings are composed of small individual canvas boards displayed edge-to-edge and numbered, both as a way of assisting installation and documenting his progress. Subsequently titled The Book of Power, Tillers’s cumulative project now consists of more than 50,000 painted canvas boards.2

Anything goes: War of the world, 1982, is an early example of the artist’s composite works which borrows its imagery from children’s book illustrations. In the manner of a cautionary tale, it has dark overtones as two sinister figures watch a curious creature of indeterminate origin chasing a rabbit through the landscape. In the context of its title, this work recalls Francisco Goya’s meditations on the capriciousness of human nature and the conse- quences when reason and order are ignored. The rabbit, a species introduced to Australia during the nineteenth century, might represent a metaphor for immigration, while the ambiguous hybrid creature at left can be seen to correspond with Tillers’s sense of the complex nature of Australian cultural identity.

1 R. Atkins, ‘Australians arrive at P.S.1’, Newsday, 11 May 1984; quoted in press release for Tillers’s exhibition, Pandemonium, Yuill/Crowley, Sydney, 18 August–12 September, 1984.

2 W. Curnow, Imants Tillers and the Book of Power, North Ryde, 1998, p. 137.

Kirsty M. Grant