Boundaries, lines demarcating the silhouette and the fullness sensed by space and volume – these evocations of form are what distinguishes Jock Clutterbuck’s art, both in his sculptural and print mediums. His exploration of landscape and the mysteries of natural phenomena transpose into a spiritual enquiry, which gestures at the nature of origins known and barely sensed. This ‘governance of instinct'(1) undoubtedly gives his work a romantic and lyrical presentation.
Clutterbuck grew up in an isolated rural environment in western Victoria. His childhood and youth at Edenhope provided him with a profound awareness and visual comprehension of space that few have the opportunity ever to experience. The vast open and flat vistas, acres of land interrupted by dark silhouetted copses of scrub, or briefly intersected by a boundary fence, emphasised the relationship of the earth with the sky and, correspondingly, the polarized subterranean with the limitless atmosphere. These were the cardinal factors that determined Clutterbuck’s enquiry then and have remained inseparable from his ideologies throughout the rest of his life.
When Jock Clutterbuck left Edenhope in 1963 to take up a State Government Studentship at the Gordon Technical College at Geelong, he found that while the course was unstructured and gave the student free rein, it did demand that a person be skilled in many areas; it also provided first rate training. He completed his third year of training at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where he came under the instruction of influential artist-teachers such as Lenton Parr, Vincent Jomantis, Joseph Zikaris, and Tate Adams.
‘An appropriate art practice should be a well conducted self enquiry’. This statement made by Lenton Parr while Clutterbuck was a student at RMIT struck a chord in relation to Clutterbuck’s own principles, and he found himself in a constructive and creative environment which provided him with intellectual stimulus and productive interpretative choices. While the year at RMIT saw him focus his sculptural concepts with a move to reductive figuration, he also found himself freely improvising and experimenting with the paradigms of pure abstraction. The triangle became a form with which he developed his minimalist sculptural concepts – a three sided figure that resolves opposites – the active, the passive and the reconciling. This student phase was characterised by a firm handling of the three dimensionality of the sculptural medium, but it also coincided with Clutterbuck enthusiastically responding to printmaking, then being taught by Tate Adams. Clutterbuck experienced an automatic and immediate response to printmaking, mastering the technical procedures and revealing a virtuosity for the medium. It also became a means of deciphering ideas that he used in his sculptures and the basis of a tandem work process evolved, each medium exerting an intricate relationship with the other.
In I966, Clutterbuck’s student period at RMIT culminated with his first solo exhibition of etchings at Tate Adams’s newly opened Crossley Street Gallery in Melbourne. This was ‘the first commercial gallery in Australia to cater solely for printmaking’(2) and was seen as a singularly exciting high profile gallery which exhibited the best of international contemporary prints, alongside works being produced by Australian local artists.
The printmaking revival of the 1960s was a world wide phenomenon, and Melbourne possibly would not have become such a focal constituent in this revival without Tate Adams’s enthusiastic involvement and his ‘commitment and appreciation of printmaking as a fine art’(3). Indeed, his role in reviving printmaking in Australia was endorsed by a number of other key individuals, such as Ruth McNicol and Grahame King, who were also keenly aware of the importance of the ‘print’ as a fine art object. The positive response by curators and collectors to contemporary printmaking was also considerable, as was evident by the substantial expansion of contemporary prints into major public and private collections within Australia.
Jock Clutterbuck’s exhibition was extremely well reviewed, Patrick McCaughey praising the young artist whose prints showed a ‘firm sculptural bias’ and in which ‘line plays wittily with volume’(4). Clutterbuck’s printmaking at this time showed a homage to certain Japanese Edo print-makers, such as Kunisada and Hokusai, and whilst Japanese printmaking of this period was characterised by the woodblock print, the occasional use of the shaped block and the artist’s visual devices for describing the world appealed to Clutterbuck. This exhibition marked Clutterbuck’s emergence into the professional Australian art world, an environment which was only just beginning to awaken itself from a period of conservatism, and to begin to acknowledge its artists in a more modernist light.
Jock Clutterbuck was seen as a seminal artist with the Melbourne Printmaking Group, a group largely consisting of artists who had studied printmaking under Tate Adams at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Subsequently these vital printmakers, including George Baldessin, Elizabeth Cross, John Neeson, Jan Senbergs, Stephen Spurrier and Tay Kok Wee, began to exhibit with Adams at his Crossley Street Gallery. In their association with other important contemporary printmakers, such as Bea Maddock and Alan Mittleman, they exerted considerable influence in the development of contemporary Australian art.
At this time Clutterbuck continued to use the RMIT printmaking facilities, and often shared this space with George Baldessin, whom he found to be a compatible work companion. Clutterbuck never formed any stylistic alliances, and retained an individual identity in his printmaking, with prints such as Waterfall 1968 and Sorcerer 1968, both reflecting the primary use of the Australian landscape. His hermetic imagery is both emphasised and controlled by the use of shaped plates and strategic colour placement which accentuates the compositional qualities. While this was a phase leaning more to minimalist and abstract values, as was the general art expression at that time, his iconography and symbolic use of protean natural forms, such as water, smoke, caves and horizons, gave his reductive images a romantic restraint and confirmed his originality and autonomy in an area all too often linked with ‘appropriation of style’ or a dependency on overt influences.
The period between 1968 and 1979 was for Clutterbuck an extraordinarily productive decade especially in terms of his printmaking, where the etching medium both stimulated and satisfied his creative needs. He was boldly experimental, applying the qualities of new materials to old techniques and he re-applied old techniques to new axioms, deconstructing in order to discover new codes of interpretation. His innovative use of the magnesium plate, a highly reactive metal, produced subtle and exciting results when the grounds were sprayed on to it, giving his bitumen aquatinting a deep, rich blackness. He developed a method of marbling on to the etching plates, which visually provided a superb textual reference to water and stone, images implicit in his ouvre. His print San Andreas Fault 1973 shows these innovative techniques at their most impressive. In other prints, such as Public Fountain 1973, he employs the use of hand stencilling to add poignant splashes of colour, and applied experimentally by varying the viscosity of the ink this was able to produce dynamic colour gradations.The embossing of cardboard, used peripherally around his plates, extended the image and softened the graphic hardness of the plate line, as seen in Burning Rubbish 1974, and provided a counter balance to the image as a whole.
During this period Clutterbuck’s work showed a progressive maturation in ideology and performance. By refining his materials and expanding his aesthetic concepts, Clutterbuck’s art became a spiritual enquiry based upon the organic representations of our local and regional landscape. For Clutterbuck, landscape is not just what the eye sees, but is what it holds, and what is above it and below it, as with the prints Temple Bar 1973 and Fountain Fragment 1975. Both these prints translate the layering of the earth’s inner mass and the multiple horizons that exist upon its surface. His etched lines and his welded or cast bars symbolize the venous networks that link the subterranean (the subconscious) to the visible realities (conscious) and the celestial mappings of the skies.
Clutterbuck’s psychological and aesthetic reference point in his art is the embracing of eastern rather than western spiritual formulations. His sympathies towards eastern traditional philosophies have provided him with an investigation of transitional events and a searching out of transmissible and primary codes. It is this response to the finite and infinite that gives Clutterbuck’s imagery a cohesion and at the same time an intangible lyricism:
The translation out of the inarticulate and the private into the general matter of human recognition requires the utmost crystallization and investment of introspection and control.(5)
Where the print as an object generally prescribes an intimacy of ownership and achievable collectibility, sculpture tends to pose a different set of rules. It has historically and largely been perceived as an art of public and social utility, and thus has had enormous difficulties in being considered otherwise, particularly in Australia. ‘Within Australia sculpture did not really get under way until the turn of the century, and only began to breathe easily after 1945’(6).
Clutterbuck’s sculptures were determined at first by the ‘social and public utility’ concept, and his work from the late 1960s to the late 1970s bore the tenets of objects angled at public spaces. His success was acknowledged by him winning the Victorian State Government Bicentenary Sculpture Award in 1970, with his sculpture Niagara 1970, a large welded aluminium work, the surface of which was highly and actively burnished. This sculpture was clearly regarded as belonging to the new and the best of Australian contemporary sculpture and was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1970. A close, but smaller counterpart is his sculpture Lock 1970 which shows a similar formalistic abstraction.
In 1973 Tom McCullough, then _Director of the Mildura Arts Centre, created the innovative ‘Sculpturescape 73’ , in which a twenty acre site was provided for the participating artists to exhibit their sculpture.This effectively ‘encouraged the artists to think on a large scale and to relate their work to the stark riverside environment’. It also marked an important departure for Australian sculpture and heralded the opportunity for artists seriously to construct works that were inspired by what was vernacular to the Australian environment. For Clutterbuck, whose creative sensibilities were so predominantly centred on the Australian landscape and its bucolic characteristics this development was timely. His sculptures of this period were mostly closed form or ‘conceptually planar’ constructions of forged and welded aluminium or steel, that stood firmly, almost defiantly in front of the viewer, such as his Temple Bar 1974.
For Jock Clutterbuck this period of sculptural activity owed a certain allegiance to American and European influences, such as David Smith and Brancusi, but by late 1970 Clutterbuck had resolved the structural and material requirements and integrated them with his own creative intellectual derivations. Clutterbuck continued to infuse his sculpture with what he was doing in his printmaking, and we see parallels in imagery from both mediums, such as the repeated horizon, the notion of the silhouette in a landscape and the illusion of mirages, as with his large print Temple Bar 1973.
Alan McCulloch writing for the Herald in 1969 said of Clutterbuck’s art ‘The distinguished feature of his work is that it lies lightly on a flat surface but evokes a feeling of mass. Behind the printmaker is a monolithic sculptor and this gives his work a strong sense of depth’. However, it was the quality of the imagery rather than the form of the sculpture that was Clutterbuck’s primary concern.
‘Landscape is a psychological geography’(7) and landscape underpins Clutterbuck’s encoded view of life. Sculpture requires at the utmost level an interchange and a forceful acknowledgement of space colliding with or nudging mass, and it is this repercussion of incident and interval that best illustrates the relationship of sculpture within space. While the issue of landscape is the nexus in Clutterbuck’s art, it is defined more in his sculpture as lineal and flattened space. Metal casting, which he began actively to use in 1978, acknowledges the ancient and traditional art of cast bronze, but it also ensures a sense of permanence and immortality and historical continuity, and so within this particular framework we can trace the ongoing line of sculpture from a Tibetan cast bronze deity to a Brancusi or a Giacometti and through to the present. All of these sculptures share the same time honored mark of ‘absolute equity’ of form and material.
In 1981, Clutterbuck entered his sculpture ‘Caves of Wiswas’ in the Corio Prize and, while it did not win, the work was purchased and donated to the Geelong Art Gallery. A highly romantic work, this cast aluminium relief sculpture draws strongly upon landscape images culled out of his printmaking, but it also marked a transitional phase (1979 – 1982) in his work. Both in his printmaking and his sculpture of this period we see how the landscape and other pictorial images begin to command a more figurative and narrative approach.
‘To create an icon, a plastic symbol of the artist’s inner sense of numinosity or mystery, or perhaps merely of the unknown dimensions of feeling and sensation, is the purpose of the great majority of modern sculptors’(8). Contained in this transitional period are certain sculptures such as Burning Teacup 1978, a polished cast aluminium piece, and Splash 1981 a polished bronze and resin work, which attempt to give form and substance to abstract notions such as the flash of recognition or insight. This sculptural attempt at describing reactions and emotions caught the attention of Patrick McCaughey, who felt that these sculptures were amongst the most ‘vivid’ of Clutterbuck’s art to that date. However, they are very wrought and intense emblematic works, and while significantly more lyrical they override the spatial dimensions which were so characteristic of Clutterbuck’s preceding sculptures and stylistic ouvre. Clutterbuck did not pursue this line of descriptive form and soon returned to sculpture that addressed and renewed his investigation into spatial domination through calligraphic boundaries.
From 1984 through to 1991, there is an obvious leap in structural and material terms, especially after his preceding pictorial period. His interest in cast metals developed markedly and his drawing and printmaking was characterised by mark making and gestural motives, and further defined by pure improvisation. Immediate intuitive processes of ‘suspending judgement’ were consciously tempered by a form of self censorship, and when Clutterbuck found this occurring, he would stop and chop up, walk away from or turn upside down the polystyrene he used to construct his linear cast iron sculptures. He began to use the method of vapour casting, where the hot cast iron metal dissolves the polystyrene. Unfortunately the crystals in cast iron are very brittle and metallurgically problematic, and so he ceased using cast iron and found that a combination of silicon and bronze proved far easier to pour in the vapour casting method. However, this metal is more resistant to the exotic patinas normally associated with traditional lead bronze, but Clutterbuck’s interest in alchemic solutions resolved this dilemma, and many of his sculptures are imbued with a marvellous rich green patina. His technical management in both his printmaking and sculpture was and continues to be acknowledged as sophisticated and authoritative. He has printed and editioned his own etchings and fabricated and cast his own sculptures, maintaining his independence and control of the material and his methodology.
Clutterbuck called this particular lineal development in his work his ‘fractal’ period, and his sculptures and prints are characterised by the use of stresses and tensions of line and curve in conjunction with arabesques and abrupt fragmented ends. It is the inseparable polarities and the disjunction of linear form with spatial form that presents us with ‘the crisis of the meaning of meaning’(9). The inner space is defined by the boundary line which is in itself defined by the outer space and thereby the power of the sculptural object is defined by the very presence of absence. Clutterbuck’s linear-bound and open form sculptures contain the paradox that is ultimately reflective of life itself: ‘An object, the description of whose formal components can be finite, demands and produces infinite responses’(10). The sculptures from this period such as Runaway Hole 1989 and Orouboros 1991 owe some allegiance to the ‘chaos theory’, whereby the artist relies on pure chance and actively encourages unmediated improvisation and immediacy of action to create the essential images of his constructions.
His prints from the same period such as Agira and Aeorus from 1987 and Cartouche 1987 result from the same process, with sawn up cardboard randomly laid down on the plate and sprayed with aquatint and then a one bite line etching process used to produce the desired effect.
One of his last large prints to be made in this ‘fractal’ period was the Coal Sack Juggler 1991 which jointly won the 1991 Fremantle Print Prize. It encapsulates Clutterbuck’s mastery of technique with a visual statement culminative of all Clutterbuck’s mannerisms. This print is a nocturnal portrait, where the artist has used for his model the regional celestial sky, and where the darkness of the night gives greater crispness and clarity to the stars and emphasises the enormity of the spatial void. It is, as Ted Snell wrote, an ‘orchestration of sooty black forms, interspersed with the three juggling balls, surrounding a central void’(11).
But it is also so much more in the intangible sense, for it is a study of man’s place in the natural world and the poetic abstraction of a response to the finite and the infinite. Perhaps more than any other primary characteristic it is this ‘mystical’ quality of Jock Clutterbuck’s prints and sculptures that uniquely defines him in contemporary art.
1. George Steiner, Real Presences, London, Faber & Faber, 1989, p.12.
2. Janine Burke and Suzanne Davies, ‘Tate Adams and Melbourne Printmaking’, Imprint, No.2 ( I 979).
3. Ibid.
4. P. McCaughey, Age, I 2 October I 966.
5. Steiner, Real Presences, p 12.
6. Graeme Sturgeon, ‘A Bicentennial Look at Australian Sculpture’, Art in Australia,Vol. 26, No. I, Spring 1988.
7. Conversation with the artist, July 1995.
8. Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, London, Thames & Hudson 1964, p 212.
9. George Steiner, Real Presences, p 92.
10. George Steiner, Real Presences, p 83.
11. Ted Snell, The Weekend Australian, 31 August 1991.
