Ian North was a major shaker in the Australian art world. Not that you would guess on meeting him – mild mannered, soft in style, a gentle man who could nevertheless change the way you saw the world with a wink, a raised eyebrow or a single phrase. His personal style was minimal, and this helped make him lovable as well as determined.

That he managed to combine creation and curation was an indicator of how he saw the world but also of how he worked.  With Gramsci, he thought of artists, also, as organizers. Art can crop up anywhere. To make is one thing; to present and share the culture is another. It means you have to do something. He did, repeatedly and variously. Solo, alone, at easel or Hasselblad; together with advocacy for Dorrit Black and Heysen and Preston, or working with Donald Judd. He was a carrier of the sublime, an agent of art as praxis.

Ian was born in Aotearoa /New Zealand in 1945. He died at home in Adelaide in the care of his devoted wife Mirna Heruc on 14 May 2024. He was my friend. I loved and admired him.

Ian was North by name, south in orientation. He migrated to Australia in 1971. He completed an MA in Art History at Flinders in 1977, another MA at the University of New Mexico in 1986, and Master of Fine Arts in 1989. Plainly he was a master. He worked as Curator of Paintings at AGSA till 1980, and Curator of Photography at NGA in Canberra from 1984. He then was Head of SA School of Art and Professor of Visual Art at UNISA. After 2001 he dedicated his life’s work to art making and writing. Major projects included Felicia, 1973; Haven, 2001; Canberra Suite, 2010; Sail Away, 2009; Adelaide Suite, 2010; Southern Ocean Off Snares Islands, 2012; East Antarctica, 2015; and Fleurieu, 2017.

Take a glimpse. The best panoramic introduction to the life and work of Ian North can be found in the meticulous and lavish Festschrift edited by Maria Zagala for AGSA, Ian North, Art/Work/Words, Adelaide, AGSA, 2018.  

We republish from that volume, with thanks to Maria Zagala and AGSA, the chapter by Peter Beilharz, ‘Due North’. This is merely a splinter’s view on his achievement. You need to spend a day with that book to get any sense of Ian North. A morsel follows below, this offered in fond memory of an extraordinary fellow, silent among us.

Due North

by Peter Beilharz

Most of my life I have lived in or around a city called Melbourne. I grew up in Croydon, at the foot of the Dandenongs. Visits to the Big Big City, as Lobby Loyde was later to call it, were infrequent when I was a child. They usually involved getting dressed up, slicked back, the Paris end of Collins Street to see a specialist or somesuch. The city, then, was no fun. It meant business, seriosity, best behaviour. But there were some moments of payoff or reward.

Sometimes we went to the Coles Cafeteria, my mum and me. Sometimes we went to the Gallery and combined Museum, as it then was. I was a sucker for the dioramas. Executed with a pleasing touch of the amateur, they contained seabirds, aging stuffed penguins and various marsupials. The backdrops were painted nicely, evoking ecologies hitherto unknown to me. We had one family holiday at suburban Bonbeach when I was little, but otherwise the local waterhole was the Croydon Swimming Pool, aromas of chlorine and hot chips, hard edges of metal and concrete, softer edges of swimsuit and human flesh. The dioramas in the Melbourne Museum suggested something else, other worlds, exotic places more exciting than Croydon. I was transported, taken away to other worlds, some of them actually quite nearby yet beyond my ken.

Imagine the sense of pleasure I had later, on encountering Ian North, via the medium of his Seasons – Kangourou. I did not know, on first view, that Ian would call the related period series Pseudo Panoramas; I did not know that there was a series, that this was to be a period style or postmodern moment for him. I did not know of that time spent in New Mexico, working in his personal sandpit of photohistory and contemplating deconstruction as the backdrop to all this swirl of innovation. What I saw, give or take a dimension, was a diorama that turned my head. I was detained, and diverted. I was taken, as I usually am, by the combination of brilliant conception and deft execution. As one whose primary medium is words, I was moved by the magical indeterminacy of these images. Over to you, they said: please interpret, read us as you will.

Much had occurred in my life in the meantime, when it came time for me to head North. Into my forties I had befriended Bernard Smith and written a book about his work called Imagining the Antipodes.¹ This was, I guess, a kind of turning point in my own intellectual biography. It was there that I had encountered the work of George Stubbs, among many other things, especially that Kangourou. Or was it, indeed a kangaroo? that odd creature here looking like the result of promiscuous intercourse between foxes and mice. Ian North chooses to manoeuvre the animal, or its figure, against his own adopted foothills, in this case those of Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges. Bernard wanted to describe Stubbs as an empirical painter, and he was; but on two occasions he painted from remains, rather than life: kangourou, and dingo. Both of these paintings are exotic, and given to the romanticism that permeated the current period style; yet both also offer information through art, as Smith observed, here in terms of the evolutionary gift of the rotating neck. As Nikos Papastergiadis tells, the pose of the kangaroo is striking; he, or she looks over the shoulder, back, perhaps, at the North, London, the Empire, over Cook’s shoulder to the person of the fixer, to the figure of Joseph Banks.² There are invisible watchers watched. The pose of the animal is flat, but suggestive of reflection. Banks is the Director, the absent presence of the cultural curator. He had commissioned the picture, to be painted from the inflated skin of the specimen retrieved by Cook on his First Voyage. If the picture is not imaginary, it is at the least imagined. And as Papastergiadis reminds, there is always the possibility that the Aboriginal word kangarou is comically agnostic in its meaning: I do not know what it is. These are worlds turned upside down, where juxtaposition or alignment says precisely to us: I do not know what it is or, if I think I know, I may well be wrong. Culture is transmitted or shared through a kind of playing along, whose referent is not always truth in any hard sense. We have to take others at their word, even if they might be making it up.

As locals we tell ourselves that we do indeed know this animal very well, even that he, or she, is us. The creature, our totem or icon, the old sign of our own antipodean improbability is in the period language of the postmodern quoted, or double coded in the work of Ian North. Another word for the placement or alignment might be juxtaposition, which attracts me as it also evokes the practice of curation, to which I shall return. So powerful is this image, this quadrant for me that I wanted to take it home, like the stuffed penguin in the Melbourne Museum when I was little. Instead I borrowed it; Ian loaned it to me as the cover image for my sequel Thinking the Antipodes,³ and there are now images of this North facing East and South in our city apartment.

What was he thinking? Ian, the artist, not the other animal. In this period he also assembled Zebra and the antipodes, as well as images from Turner, Glover, Monet, then Cazneaux and Hurley and Heysen. The influence of Dorrit Black and the bare bones of landscape is I think a constant presence in his rural imagery. A different echo is in the work of Imants Tillers, and elsewhere again Colin McCahon. But the power of South Australia in his work is so strong you can smell it. These are some of the found aesthetic objects of North’s life.

The use of juxtaposition places, and displaces. As Ian North observes, the Zebra is doubly displaced, relayed via the metropole and then via these antipodes.⁴ Yet South Australia could also be South Africa, in topography and light, just as his Fleurieu could be New Mexico if not quite Santa Fe, or his Canberra the flat or despondent American suburbia which can be glimpsed in the work of Lee Friedlander or Robert Frank. Except that, and he uses the word carefully, North’s own work sidesteps that dystopian badlands aura of some other artwork.⁵ More explicit topographical influences are to be found in the work of photographers like Robert Adams and Steven Shore, where images of the painted landscape also work on the practice of the camera, and there is sublime as well as quotidian filtered into the frame of everyday life. Even where suburbia is drab, and Felicia disappoints, all the way from Bentham to Dunstan and Whitlam there is always the salvation of sky and clouds, the visual arch which follows North around ever since he first met JMW Turner as a youth in those other, greener, damper tectonics of the antipodes across the Tasman. The wonder of the natural offers the horizon of hope, in North’s work. There are animals, and landforms, clouds and rainbows but few people. This is a world whose wonders may have been best left alone by the invaders and intruders who began to arrive after the French and Dutch and then Cook and his mates. Everything in these antipodes is framed by Empire, by colonialism.

The South African echo is disturbing, even as it too is unsurprising – everything is framed by Empire, by colonialism. It is not just the eucalypts or the deserts, or even the struggles over race and gold that echo across the Indian Ocean. Like David Goldblatt, North turns into colour in order to capture nature or environment more than the human actors who for the classical Goldblatt are so inevitably black and white.³ Like William Kentridge, North cannot get past the primeval quality of charcoal; and there is also a kind of soft performative character to his work, a presence which is more strident in Kentridge, who is rather given to open self-portrayal. North is absent from his own work, in this figurative sense. In some of those earlier snaps, we see only his back, as in David Caspar Friedrich.

Like the best of the South African artists, he needs to bleed North into South, South into North, flip over the coordinates, turn the map upside down. He is, after all, a boy from the south of the north island of Aotearoa. Context and biography matter, in all of this, but it is the artwork that calls out to you, demands of you that you stop and behold. Juxtaposition, in this way of thinking and working, also indicates inversion. The act of manoeuvre is everything. But the author remains offstage. His purpose is to be romantic, to evoke the romantic in terms of art history, but not the sentimental. His is an absent presence.

Are these works of the nineteen eighties, then, as North calls them Pseudo Panoramas?  Certainly they double, in the Seasons and the Zebra, in Stubbs’ lost spaniel, Turner in the wheatfields, the cascading and shrinking images out of Cazneaux … And at least once they pluralise even more radically, in multiplied images of The World That Is Not The Case. Pseudo, however, suggests false, unreal; and these images are real, even when they are uncanny. They offer weight, and are suggestive of substance. The kangaroo is real, even if its representation today feels like a caricature warped by the perception of its first European painter. The World That Is Not The Case begins by inverting Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus to the contrary. Here we see the Melbourne philosophers at work, Wittgenstein and Eccles flying a kite of more earnest provenance than Tatlin’s ornithopter, the 2002 StarWars missile test off right indicating a more spectacular kind of contemporary aeronautics.⁴ The result of North’s art is a kind of controlled spectacle, a culture, a workshop, an experiment writ both large and small. It is not a mural, but it may be a kind of postmodern symposium.

This is where the image of juxtaposition returns, like the repressed. Always juxtapose, or combine: this could be the compass that points North. The Canberra Suite juxtaposes beauty and desolation; the figure of the animal here alternates with that of the EH model Holden. The spaniel and the wheatbelt in other pieces follow the same structure as much of the Canberra Suite. There are broad horizons evoked, of visual scope and of possibility. Beauty and desolation might be thought of as coming together, as a real rather than artistic combination. The juxtaposition here is in the composition and the capture. It is in the turn of the neck, or the wrist, in the sideways glance or twist of the brain. In the Panoramas, the juxtaposition is firmer, more external. Both images and frames are juxtaposed in this work. There is a picture within the picture, a foreign motif within a more familiar landscape. A poke in the eye. Perhaps it is an extension of an older strategy, from Shakespeare to Velazquez, but the feeling given is of the modern (they were also modern, anticipating modernism or modernity; but they could not have known Canberra, or the Fleurieu).

Ian North’s artistic style in this work is for me curatorial, or at least suggestive of the curatorial. What is a curator? Ian North was told firmly by Daniel Thomas and Frances Lindsay earlier in life that you could not be both: you could not paint or make art and also curate.⁵ Curation has, I suppose been historically viewed as art historical, serial and developmental. More recently the category has gone viral, or at least spread so far as to take in food, fashion and decor, and this likely also means that the category has become diluted, overexercised, bordering on meaningless. For at least a generation, however, the practice of aesthetic curation has also relied on juxtaposition, across time and genre, theme and association, and certainly across cultures, as is apparent in Australian state galleries like the NGV and SA, and announced more loudly in frontier projects like MONA.

There is, of course, a discourse on curation, led by other wiser heads than mine, such as those of Terry Smith. Here, the work involved in curation is understood in terms of organizing images or actions. This, it seems to me, is exactly (or inexactly) what Ian North does in the Pseudo Panoramas. He adds value, in the aesthetic sense, or engages making the new by aligning images that would not otherwise be aligned; kangarou; zebra; Wittgenstein’s kite; backdrops surprise, matters out of place, the times out of joint, settings that surprise or tease. It is the process of alignment that generates the receiver effect. Two, or more images that would not otherwise be thought together are brought together; the addition, or alignment is what generates the magic, the act which makes us look over the human shoulder, to see twice, to see anew, to experience some conceptual and experiential shift. North upsets habit, and asks us to change habitus.

Is this then curation, art as curation, juxtaposition, alignment? As I write this piece I discover that Terry Smith and I also have other points of intersection. Terry tells us that he, like me, had some formative moments in the Melbourne Museum and Gallery when he was a boy. For him, it was a visit in tow with his dad, to see the great Phar Lap, the legendary stuffed racehorse, and the dinosaurs, which led upstairs to the Felton Bequest, and the revelatory images of William Blake. Later he was to discover that this was Ursula Hoff’s plan, as curator – to lure the youth upstairs, from the dead world of natural history to the new world of prints and drawings. As Terry Smith puts it, ‘This is curating as laying out the lure’.⁶

Ian North lays out the images. By organizing them in his particular way he follows the logic of what Antonio Gramsci much earlier anticipated as the practice of the intellectual as organizer. This practice might be pedagogical or creative in style; it invariably involves the work of imagination and performance. It combines the imaginative power of creation with the fine skills of execution, whether in studio or with camera. Its effect is to make you, or me, stop, and want to share with those we respect, or love. For me, it transforms the diorama, connects me back to my boyhood and past, and makes me think and wonder anew. It makes me draw breath, and reminds me of older wisdoms; dum spiro spero. It breathes life, and hope into a world that often seems flat and desolate, sinking under its own artifice, its own excess of images and detritus.

Those two images on the walls of our Melbourne apartment are a print of that fine kangarou, in Seasons, and the much larger image from Antarctica, where the solitary dirigible hangs suspended in the most fragile of media before it is fixed: charcoal, over the Monet expanse of purple-black photographic ice floes and a single sinking but icebound vessel, perhaps that of modernity. Every day I face North, and contemplate my great good fortune for this crossing of paths. This much is due to North. Have I been lured? Yes, and gladly, willingly. His work detains us. It does not shout; it persists. It will persist.

Notes

1. Beilharz, P 1996, Imagining the Antipodes – Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne ↩︎
2. Papastergiadis, N. 2016, ‘Thinking the Antipodes’, Thesis Eleven, 134 Sage, London, p.138 ↩︎
3. Beilharz, P. 2015, Thinking the Antipodes, Monash University Press, Clayton ↩︎
4. North, I. 2016, Pseudo Panorama Australia (Zebra), unpublished notes, p.2 ↩︎
5. North, I. 2009/2010, Notes for Daniel Palmer, Grove Encyclopedia Project ↩︎
6. Goldblatt, D. 2015, The Pursuit of Values, Standard Bank/Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg ↩︎
7. Speck, C. nd, The World is All That Is Not The Case, unpublished ↩︎
8. North, I. 2012, with Pedro de Almeida, ‘Just Allowing it to be – A Conversation’, ASX online, np ↩︎
9. Smith, T. 2012, Thinking Contemporary Curating, ICI, New York, pp. 24-5 ↩︎