Firstly, I’d like to thank Jock and Stuart for inviting me to say a few words, by way of introduction to the opening of this great exhibition. An exhibition that represents the culmination of several, recent years of work but also a body of work that so clearly reflects the achievements of a mature artist at the height of his powers having mastered and sustained his chosen disciplines of sculpture and printmaking over many decades of practice.

For my own part, if I am to offer anything of interest regarding how one might approach this complex and beautiful exhibition, it’s from the standpoint of being an artist and more specifically from the standpoint of someone who has also spent a considerable amount of time making and thinking about sculpture.
To this end, I offer you a few of my thoughts and observations.

When I look at Jocks work, I recognise an artist who has a close affinity with the history of sculpture.
Emerging from a period when abstract formalism was in ascendency one can recognise, both the achievements of that exciting period of innovation and experimentation alongside a recognition of the deep legacy of sculpture handed down to us from antiquity.

The former, through the constructive and improvised play with forms, abstraction, variation, positive and negative space, and asymmetry.
The latter through its materiality, stillness, verticality, symmetry, the ornamental, and its relationship with notions of ascension and sacred time and space.

I’m not the first to recognise that there is a natural affinity between the art of printmaking and sculpture and in consideration of Jocks work with etching, with its links to the materiality of metalwork, relief carving, and inscription.

This relationship is not merely one of the 2-dimensional image or drawing functioning as a preparatory way of conceiving of sculpture but also as a process of marking, excavating, and shaping surfaces on the horizontal and vertical plane, a process I would suggest that (in historical terms) inevitably gestured towards bas relief, high relief, and eventually full-fledged 3-dimensional form.

Of course, alongside this we also have the evolution and development of architectural form and the emergence of written language both in terms of inscription the hieroglyph and its more abstract cousin cuneiform.

These almost magical developments inevitably found expression in ideas, objects and rituals related to the sacred and other aspects of cosmology and more specifically in sculpture.

Once again, I recognise much of this in Jock’s work with its play between the diagrammatic, the cross-section or plan view one might find in architecture or an archaeological site, or the vertical framing of a view through a window, the portal, or a screen.

Each of the sculptures here, confidently play with the silhouette both inside and outside the frame, sometimes open or fragmented, at other times enclosed. There is often slippage between what seems initially abstract and then figurative, domestically scaled, or monumental.
At one moment the handle of a mechanism or a head like image partially comes into view only to dissolve into a labyrinth of passageways and stair like structures.

These influences paradoxically bring to the work both a sense of movement and sculptural articulation redolent of the everyday and the restless spirit of our own contemporary age but also a powerful sense of deep time and a focus on something more philosophically essential.

There is also – simultaneously both a brightness of play and humour in the way ideas and forms are brought together and an undeniable feeling of serious endeavour in the way these intriguing and emblematic works address us and reveal themselves to us over time.

There is a lot more I could say about the complexity and richness of these works, however it is at this juncture that I must retreat and as I do, highlight what I believe to be the most important aspect of looking at artworks. Which is not through someone like me expressing their opinion, however illuminating that might be, but through experiencing them yourself.

So, without further ado I’d like to congratulate Jock and invite you all to please enjoy the exhibition. Thank you

The five years from 1967 to 1972 marked a period of significant societal change on a global scale. It was a time of social extroversion, political unrest and cultural agitation as the generation born in the aftermath of war found its voice and lay claim to a world despoiled by their elders. And yet the period was also one of immense spiritual awakening, when artists of the West became receptive to ideas that had underpinned the art and culture of the East for centuries. One artist who found his way ‘amid the noise and haste’ (to quote a poem popularised during this period), was Jock Clutterbuck.

Within the early art of Jock Clutterbuck we discern an elegant interplay of contradictions, of the material and the immaterial, of the personal and the universal, and of the systemic and the poetic. Working within the dual disciplines of printmaking and sculpture he forged a distinctive journey through artmaking that singled him out as an enigma within his field. Guided by the urge to create and to understand, his art represents both a oneness with the cosmos and a quest for material coherence.

In a career now spanning over five decades, Clutterbuck’s visual vocabulary has grown more complex and sophisticated as it has matured. Looking back, we find the seeds of today’s art sewn in his work of the late 1960s, when his personal vision was boldly forged through a series of works that have lost none of their inventive power and aesthetic allure in the years since.

In 1967 Clutterbuck, then aged twenty-two, had recently completed his Fine Art studies at RMIT (under luminaries such as Lenton Parr Vincas Jomantas and Teisutis Zikaras). He was also, by this time, a qualified art teacher. Newly married and with his career ahead of him, Clutterbuck accepted a position at Warragul High School in West Gippsland. On Weekends he returned to his studio in Melbourne, shared with George Baldessin.

Artistically, 1967 found Clutterbuck under the spell of Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi, two European sculptors who distilled anthropomorphic tendencies into elegantly simplified forms. We detect shadows of each within Aeikon, a breakthrough work that augured the preoccupation with celestial forms and the movement of water that would come to distinguish his oeuvre.

The following year, now settled in Balwyn, he was introduced to Eastern systems of thought through two books: The Tarot: A Contemporary Course of the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism by Mouni Sadhu, and Tantra Art by Ajit Mookerjee. Clutterbuck’s art evolved rapidly; his ‘wisdom journey’ had begun. New to his work was an increasing cosmological clarity and a benign spiritual energy. His prints and sculptures observed the refrain of Tantric Art which, in the words of Mookerjee, ‘can make us see the universe as if it were within ourselves, and ourselves as if we were within the universe’. Accordingly, the form ‘that our imagination creates then expresses our formless essence’.1

A technically gifted artist whose childhood on an isolated farm in Western Victoria had been characterised by ‘making things’ from available materials, Clutterbuck now sought a greater purpose within his work. His art became a lightning rod that received ideas from the unconscious world-perhaps the most truthful state of consciousness-and given physical form. These forms were simplified and reduced to their essential essence, in the manner of Brancusi, while still retaining the ‘impact of the original image’. Clutterbuck explains his process in this way:
“The silent world of possibilities and archetypes is my preoccupation. Out of this zone we are able to bring back something, to give it form and have it stand in the world and give it a name, but the essential power in the work is always beyond words and has always worked its effect on us before we notice it. It just ‘IS’”.2

In 1968 Clutterbuck arrived at a set of themes and key motifs that have inhabited his work since: earth, atmosphere and water, expressed through the multiple scallop shell pattern, the ‘cartouche’ form, and an array of geometric shapes (dominated by the circle, the oval, and the triangle). Colour has always been a consideration for Clutterbuck, and he uses it with restraint. When we do find colour within his prints it is often in the form of either a full spectrum burst (as in the 1970 prints Pool Table, Small black cloud with lake, and Niagara) or a limited spectrum range, such as the red, orange and yellow gradients present within Sunrise (1968) and Pool (1971).

Sculptures of this period were executed almost entirely in polished aluminium. They echo the forms of the prints, but in their three dimensionality they brazenly occupy physical space. While the prints might be understood as windows into a metaphysical world, the sculptures are the metallic flotsam that have crossed the border altogether. The themes of descending water are present in Niagara, the major sculpture here from 1970, as well as Lock, Scattered Showers, Cold Front and Pool Table.

While it is tempting to look for literal associations within each form, and to expect a certain didactic insight from their titles, Clutterbuck reminds us that the titles are merely signposts, ‘pointing to the meaning of the artwork’.

The work in itself is nameless and beyond words and is a bit like a railway station, a starting point and everybody goes on a different journey. 3

For the artist, whose own journey is one of accumulating wisdom, the fathoming of original forms from the ether is much like assembling the pieces of a cathedral. The artworks are talisman on his road to enlightenment; the church a beacon to his spirituality. ‘Breathing life into this subconscious and working with what bubbles up out of my intuition is a long slow sensitive process’, he writes.

The work undertaken fifty years ago became the foundations for a lifelong artistic practice. Revisiting those foundations today is as rewarding as it is insightful, and brings with it an appreciation of the discipline of thought and of practical dexterity that such a practice demands of the artist.

Simon Gregg
Director, Gippsland Art Gallery, 2021

Notes
1. Ajit Mookerjee, Tantra Art: Its Philosophy & Physics, Ravi Kumar, New Delhi, 1966, p.11
2. Jock Clutterbuck, cited in Philine Bracht, David Ng, Peter W. Thompson (eds), Jock Clutterbuck: An Artist Drawing from Nature and Psychic Connections, Kunstler Bei Wu & Holy Verlag, Wesenberg, 2017, p.28
3. ibid, p.36 —

T. S. Eliot in an essay on Yeats, spoke of the dilemma facing a creative person in maturity: “….man has three choices: to stop writing altogether: to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill of virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way of working …. Most men either cling to the experiences of youth, so that their writing becomes an insincere mimicry of their earlier work, or they leave their passion behind, and write only from the head, with a hollow and wasted virtuosity.”(81)

Many artists, who are also teachers, when they retire plunge into a sterile virtuosity as they repeat their youthful rages. Others, in an attempt to make up for lost time, rush into a body of work which they had always intended to do, but which teaching prevented them from attempting earlier, only to realise that there was nothing there in the first place. Jock Clutterbuck had been exceptionally productive throughout his teaching career and had over the years put in place a transition strategy so that his country studio was of huge dimensions, with its own foundry. In 2002 he simply extended this and also created his own sculpture park on the property. However, in the dozen years since his retirement from teaching, it has not been a case of more of the same, but a rather subtle change in his mode of work and in his mode of thought.

Over the preceding years he devised a repertoire of motifs, such as the multiple scallop shell pattern, the cartouche form, the aquatic and celestial images, and in the past few years he has in part implemented them and devised a comprehensive personal iconography. It is not only that the work is uniquely his and has a presence and authority, but that his lexicon has become so extensive and fluid that it extends into a vast array of subjects. This personal iconography not only distils many aspects of his “Wisdom Journey”, but also taps into his personal psyche drawing on childhood experiences, dreams, phobias and revelations. If one can generalise about the body of sculpture which has emerged in recent years conveying this personal iconography, then it seems largely to have three things in common.

Firstly, many of the pieces are anthropomorphic, frequently structured on a pedestal and in proportions operating on a human scale. Secondly, many of the sculptures relate to the scale of not only the human body but specifically to the proportions of the artist’s body – the gestural reach, the autograph mark, a self-portrait of sorts – what the artist describes as the “large humanoid insect-like aspect of the thing”.(82) Finally, the patina plays an increasingly more important role and whether the piece is totemic, takes on a dervish form or is embedded in Mozarabic ornament, it always has the quality of a handmade artefact, one through which Gurdjieff felt that you could grasp the meaning of what they wanted to convey to us across thousands of years, as well as the emotional and spiritual content.

In 2001 Tate Adams re-entered Jock Clutterbuck’s life, this time as a publisher of limited edition artists’ books in the grand tradition of the livres d’artistes. Adams, when still teaching at the RMIT, in 1977 set up the Lyre Bird Press to publish de luxe artists’ books and finally, on retiring in 1982 and shifting to Townsville in 1989, he re-established the press at the James Cook University where he became an honorary lecturer. It was here that Clutterbuck’s sumptuous artist’s book, Listening to the stars, came into being. The edition of twenty, plus five hors commerce copies, with its eight etchings with acquaint, some with stencilled colour, was printed by the artist in the VCA workshop in 1999, while the letterpress and binding were done in Queensland in 2001. The book was launched in 2002 and was acquired by the State Library of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. The idea of the book, as Clutterbuck later noted: ” … is an articulation of an interest in the majesty of the night sky, and the relationship that exists between our subjective imagination and the Sufi concept of a universal imagination as an intermediary between us and the unknowable essence. We recreate the world of the night sky for ourselves out of this relationship”. As lbn al-‘Arabi famously wrote in the twelfth century: “We are moons in the darkness of the night; wherever we sit, there is the head of the room. If contemptuous fate unjustly takes away our greatness, it cannot take away the greatness of our souls.” The etchings, The moon, Venus at 3 am, In the Pleiades, Venus 241189, Jupiter being transited by an aeroplane, Dawn star, Two dark stars and Talisman star all have a velvety black background, where the stars appear as a blinding bright light. Clutterbuck made no further prints until 2010 when he built himself a new press for his country studio.

The celestial theme was also to play an important role in one of his major sculptures a couple of years later, the Two moon screen. The germ of the idea was already apparent in his large etching Homage to the full moon, 1987, and found expression in a cast bronze maquette of 2004 from which the Crown Towers Hotel commissioned for a hotel foyer. The large, fabricated brass screen is over two metres high and six and half metres across.(84) If in the etching the various ideographs had a more organic relationship, in the sculpture the cartouche form is more regimented and broken into four distinct panels. The floating voids in the print have now been more disciplined in their play with negative spaces. Despite the tighter geometry in the sculptural screen, the cosmic elements exist in a tightly balanced equilibrium which also hints at something of an Islamic symbolic ornament, the so-called “geometry of the line”. Unlike Islamic geometry, where the circle, square and line are ruled up with a compass and ruler, Clutterbuck’s cosmic geometry strongly bears the human touch; in his art it is the cosmic mediated through an individual psyche.

After extensive travels to Europe and America, Clutterbuck in 2006 and 2007 embarked on a major series of cast bronze sculptures, some of which were exhibited in his solo shows at Australian Galleries in Melbourne in 2007 and 2008, and some thirty-seven bronzes and sixteen large pastel drawings were included in the survey exhibition ‘Sculptures and Drawings 1990-2008’ held at the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum in 2008 which was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay written by Alex Selenitsch. At the same time, in 2008, one of his larger bronzes was included in the immensely popular ‘Sculpture by the Sea’ at Bondi in Sydney and he was also selected for the ‘Montalto Sculpture Prize’ at Red HilI in Victoria. He continued to frequently exhibit in the various sculpture competitions.(85)

These sculptures range in height from between about 190 centimetres to 25 centimetres with many conceived as maquettes with scope for realisation on a more monumental scale. His working method by this stage had become fixed. In the studio there are boxes of different shapes and sizes of polystyrene foam out of which the artist assembles, sculpts and models the sculptural forms until a moment is reached when the concept of the sculpture reveals itself. Then a shell mould is created around the foam sculpture and usually molten manganese bronze is poured into the mould and the metal sculpture is born before the surfaces can be treated to create a patina. The beauty of this method is that it has provided Clutterbuck with the maximum flexibility in the process of creation, where he can work intuitively and increasingly incorporate chance, but at the same time have maximum control in the casting process achieving beautiful permanent surfaces as well as the potential for casting multiples in editions.

Titles for his pieces, such as Small spanda, 2006, a Sanskrit term suggesting a creative pulse of the universe and establishing a personal harmony with that pulse, or Dervish, 2007, all hint at an Eastern mysticism as a source of inspiration. Talisman, 2006, and Wiswas emblem, 2007, two of the major pieces from this series have an intricacy and complexity, but also an emblematic simplicity. Gurdjieff’s philosophy engaged the world of dance, movement and music and in Clutterbuck’s more recent work it is possible to see a conscious or even unconscious manifestation of this in his sculptural practice. Movement and rhythm and a breathing harmony of the universe as well as the music of the spheres resound throughout his recent exhibitions. Some of his sculptures, including Song of the Aisors, 2007, reference directly a famous Gurdjieff/de Hartmann piano piece, “Song of the Aisors”, while other sculptures including Small Yantra no 1 and Small Yantra no 2, both of 2006, tap into broader Sanskrit ideas of symbols often associated with the Tantric tradition. A whimsical piece, such as Little lblis no 2, 2006, may refer to the mischievous spirits who in Islamic thought reside in a parallel universe and can influence human behaviour. Some of his pieces, including Yggdrasil, 2007, may relate to the great tree of Old Norse mythology and find resonance in the twisted branches of the sculptural form.

His personal iconography does relate directly to a personal cosmology, but not in an illustrative manner. His method of work is not to set out with a resolved concept in search of a form, but to work within a general body of ideas and to allow the whole creative process suggest what at first may appear as random connections which then can grow into a sculptural form which self-discloses a concept when it is successfully resolved. In his art there is no attempt made to simulate an oriental language of the past, but a personal emersion over several decades in Islamic art has invariably led to a receptivity to such forms and if some sort of parallel springs to mind with the ornamental relief arches of the Great Mosque in Cordoba or with the stunning architectural decoration of the Alhambra in Granada, these may well, even if unconsciously, find an echo in his art. Yet the formal resolution of the work is markedly contemporary with edges left raw and hinting at the texture of the polystyrene foam. Strange mechanical shapes will appear from time to time in the sculptural assemblages in this way disrupting any tendency to romanticise the past. Like the artist himself, the work is imbued with humour, and frequently with verbal puns, so that the full seriousness of the work can be subverted with a touch of gentle tongue-in-cheek mockery. In the process of dance and music the body and spirit can arise to a higher state and partake in the joy of being and it is precisely this unity which is sought and frequently achieved in the art.

Clutterbuck commenced his career with a study of the western tradition of art, especially of contemporary practice in Europe and America. With time his interests extended to oriental art, to the ancient art of Egypt and the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as to the sand paintings in Vanuatu at Port Vila. All of these he visited and studied at first hand and to some extent they have also started to influence his practice. It was only after he stopped teaching that he had the time and opportunity to travel widely and, together with Iris Fischer, he explored alternative systems of visualisation and moved away from the strongly Eurocentric art of his youth. Gurdjieff once exclaimed: “I studied Western art after studying the ancient art of the East. To tell you the truth, I found nothing in the West to compare with Eastern art. Western art has much that is external, sometimes a great deal of philosophy; but Eastern art is precise …. It is a form of script.”(86) In the 21st century Clutterbuck increasingly sought out a new script for the new century, a script which was not anchored within a specific narrow tradition of art-making, but which sought a universal language and tapped into a common experience of humankind.

Clutterbuck’s prints and sculptures over the past few years – such as the bronzes A candle in a darkened room, 2007, Waterlily, 2008, Night noise entity, numbers 1-3, 2011, Large temple bar, 2011, and the fabricated and cast aluminium piece, The hope molecule, 2012, and the etchings Night sky cartouche and The exterminating angel, both of 2011 – all have in common his desire to achieve an emblematic lucidity which is communicated in a direct and non-verbal manner. Many of these could be described as having a totemic quality, where the work exists in a three dimensional space and where primacy is given to a single dominant concept, such as enlightenment in darkness or fecundity through growth of a waterlily. The sculptural elements then focus and expand on the idea. While they may be described as possessing a deceptive simplicity, there is also a complexity and sophistication in their technical realisation. The desire was to capture the essence of an idea, but to do this in such a way that it appeared timeless and not anchored within a particular culture, place or civilisation. As Clutterbuck recently commented: ” … if in a thousand years time [we were speaking about his Night noise entity no. l] someone discovered this, I would be insane enough to want to believe that people would think that it came from ancient Egypt.”(87)

The path which Jock Clutterbuck has mapped out in his art for the best part of half a century, from his earliest work as an art school student in the early 1960s through to 2013, is a huge journey from the local and the parochial to the universal and the timeless. The concern with how we relate to the universe, how the individual relates to the whole and how we can fully realise the potential of what it means to be human, in some ways these concerns have remained constant, but the referential framework and the language and the techniques employed have altered substantially. In 1916, in Moscow, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff addressed a group of students where he raised the question of the nature of true art: “I do not call art all that you call art, which is simply mechanical reproduction, imitation of nature or of other people, or simply fantasy or an attempt to be original. Real art is something quite different …. In your art everything is subjective – the artist’s perception of this or that sensation, the forms in which he tries to express his sensation and the perception of these forms by other people …. In real art there is nothing accidental …. The artist knows and understands what he wants to convey, and his work cannot produce one impression on one man and one impression on another …. “(88) Gurdjieff is one of many thinkers who has influenced Clutterbuck on his journey of self-realisation. He shares Gurdjieff’s desire to create an art which is universal and accessible to all people and increasingly over the past few years he has achieved this in his work.

81 T.S. Eliot, ‘Yeats’ (1940) , reprinted in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected prose of T.S. Eliot, London: Faber and Faber, 1975, p.253
82 Jock Clutterbuck, taped interview with the author, Drummond, Victoria, 24 March 2012
83 Two moon screen maquette, 2003-04, cast bronze, 130 x 44 x 4cm
84 Two moon screen, 2004, fabricated brass, 220 x 650 x 20cm, Crown Towers Hotel
85 Clutterbuck again exhibited at ‘Sculpture by the Sea’ at Bondi in 2012, and at Montalto in 2010 and 2011, ‘Lorne Sculpture Exhibition’ in 2009 and in the ‘Deakin Small Sculpture Award’ in 2009, 2010 and 2012
86 G.I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975,p.183
87 Jock Clutterbuck, taped interview with the author, Drummond, Victoria, 24 March 2012
88 Gurdjieff quoted in Peter D. 0uspensky, In search of the miraculous, New York: Random House, 1971, p.26

When I came in to look at this show last Friday, I was overwhelmed by the huge ‘wow’ factor.

It is a stunning show in every aspect of the word. It is bold, inventive, brilliantly executed and possesses a real sense of presence. The work does not look like anybody else’s, the sculptures and etchings possess a unique appearance, a peculiar aesthetic, one that has evolved over several decades of struggle.

Tonight, I will try to explain how, I think, he has arrived at it.

Many artists, including very good ones, are essentially formalists and are primarily concerned with the formal resolution of their compositions – line, mass, volume, gravity, and colour – the pleasing and harmonious disposition of all of these elements. Their work finishes at this point.
Others are fundamentally Romantics, for whom the gestural mark, the performance in the arena of the canvas or sheet of paper and the feeling of wonderment at their own responses to nature are a source of endless fascination. This Romantic fascination with the world and the artist’s response to it, is the key to their art. With Jock Clutterbuck there is of course the formalist element, mandatory for any serious artist, and there is also the Romantic gut response, he is amazed by the celestial heavens at night or by the sound of silence in the bush, but I think that there is also a further element, an unusual element, that places his art into a separate category.

His art and his life are imbued with a mystical philosophy, a profound quest for making sense of our world, its functioning and the way things appear in it. He calls this a knowledge journey. This is not an example of ‘new ageism’ or a tokenistic nod to Zen philosophy or holistic theories of the ‘world spirit’, but a profound, detailed and all absorbing study over many decades of complex and frequently arcane texts.

Ontology, the title of this exhibition, as many of you would know better than I, is a branch of metaphysical philosophy where at the most basic level, it consists of a questioning of what makes a human, human and how the world around this person operates. It is a study into the nature of being, of becoming, of existence, and of course a questioning of reality. A key mentor for Jock Clutterbuck’s thinking has been the Russian-born, mystical philosopher Gurdjieff. Personally I find the writings of Gurdjieff complex and in places impenetrable, even after four of five readings of the same passage of text. The genius of Jock Clutterbuck has been to distil this knowledge into wisdom and make it visible and articulate through his art.

It is this sense of otherness, profound distillation of ideas and an enormous meditative power which informs his art practice. It is this that gives many of his creations their ineffable inner strength, as well as provides them with awkward and impossible to pronounce titles. It is a very deep vein of thought which we excavate in Jock Clutterbuck’s art.

Many artists ascribe to what Wassily Kandinsky termed as Kleine Welten, where each artwork is an autonomous microcosm, a reflection of a view of the world as a self-contained cosmic entity consisting of endless and autonomous hermetic units. In Jock Clutterbuck’s art each piece is a self-contained ‘small world’, complete within itself, yet endlessly and intimately relating to a broader series and to a bigger universe. I have had the privilege of living with a couple of his creations and have allowed them to assert their own particular brand of magic and their living mystical contemplative presence. They are beautiful and highly subversive objects and no home should be without one. So please, before you leave tonight, acquire one of these wonderful prints or sculptures. You have my word for you, they will add to your feeling of happiness, wellbeing and the sense of oneness with the cosmic universe. Try it, like all good art; it will change your life.

Congratulations to Jock for sharing his amazing gift with us. It is a humbling honour to declare this exhibition Ontology officially open.

Sasha , 17. Nov. 2013

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.

If any art movement had any strong influence on the last 25 years on art making, this was Dadaism and its prophet Marcel Duchamp with his postulate
– anything can be Art
– Art is life.

This is mainly the work of people like John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Rauschenberger, who in the early 1950s re-discovered Dadaism and Duchamp. For the Fluxus Movement (as they became known), art = everything = anything = nothing. For the most radical artists it was necessary to achieve a profanation of art and its destruction. They did so by using cadavers, blood letting (Kaprow, Nitzch, Otto Muhl), or by using a violent Marxist analysis of the artistic ideology like Henry Flynt who claimed to be the first conceptual artist.
As a consequence of conceptual art, art gave pre-eminence to the comment over the work. Art was produced as a commentary. “Anything is Art”, school of thought, became a spectacular attitude without deep roots in life. It gained autonomy by becoming an artificial spectacle.

This pulse, generated by certain social ills, wrongly labelled “Avant Garde” is nearing its term. We see on the front line, the come back of an aspiration to artistic pleasure. After a time during which ugly = art, we are entering an era where probably visual pleasure and elegance will have a prime importance.

This is where Jock Clutterbuck fits in.

Jock never relinquished elegance in the spacial resolutions of his works. I expect from the years to come, to be his as well as the years of his peers with a similar approach.

Michel Sourgnes
Gallery Director, Mildura Arts Centre, Victoria, Australia

There are, of course, virtuoso printmakers who delight in technical prowess; their prints record a repertoire of techniques, often consummately combined. Others alert us to techniques, but so wed the technique to the content that the technique comes upon us as something new for it has been re-discovered and revivified.
It seems that the technique has discovered the image and the image has conjured up the appropriate and compelling technique.

Such a printmaker – or principally etcher – is Jock Clutterbuck.

One feels that he constantly explores the impression of the block on the paper; the subtle or positively empathic degree of pressure is sensitively felt; the image is suffused with the paper; it does not sleep there.
The paper, never allowed to be inert, comes to life through the varied pressures and inks.

For Clutterbuck the process of printmaking is not a “minting”, but an unfolding, a revelation and exploration of the synthesis of paper, pressure, inks and images.
Such closely felt processes have limited his editions two between ten and twenty.

It is generally recognised that artists are now drawing more and more attention to the ground on which they operate, some being content to exhibit their own hand-made papers without benefit of print or pencil; Clutterbuck is part of the movement that draws attention to the ground or vehicle for his signs and symbols.

There is much more to it than that, just as Clutterbuck sets up at times an antithesis between technique and message, his messages are made to struggle to reveal themselves.

His images are self-contained in form, if not in associations.
Rarely does he allow the image to proceed to the edge of the paper as in Sweet Wrapper (1973, x/15); however, his images are not monolithic; Wave (1971, x/15) and Cave no 3 (1975, x/20) can resemble, respectively, a black and grey mountain and a black butterfly, but they have internal, organic rhythms of repeated wing and wave contours.
Just as the etching plate binds the image, so undulating wave shapes, flattened to look like rope, can compress a mountain shape as in Cave with falling Object (1975, x/20).

Since 1968 Clutterbuck has not regarded it as essential to employ an overall composition that runs to the edges; he isolated the images and stressed the effectiveness of untouched space which they are inhabited.
Waterlily (1968, x/10) was a circle, and Pool (1971, x/15), was a vertical pile of overlapping eclipses, the bottom one opaque sandy yellow and others flowing with greyed aquatint.
(Clutterbuck masterly juxtaposes the opaque and the diaphanous).

Such works indicated his interest in the generative repetition of shapes. In the early seventies his work grew stormier and darker; the waves, caves and strata-forms, so well exemplified in San Andreas Fault (1973, x/15), became gloomy and menacing, despite the velvet softness of the blacks, the quiet, ashen-grey ochres and the partly decorative scollop shapes: titles referred to Fire Water Waves (1973, x/15) and Presentation Stone Wave (1974, x/15).

However, by 1975 the greys had become more delicate and they overlapped more subtly and less aggressively, but more importantly, the sweetest of touches began to appear – washes of pale, fuchsia, mauves, faded pink and fugitive ancient ochres – and reminded us how much Japan has influenced him and how much he has kept his fantasy under control.

Runaway Hole (1975, x/20) a series of concentric ellipses with shapes trying to escape, was placed in an area of impressed, torn paper: it looked as if the image has been uprooted; indeed, each of his prints is a kind of reservoir teeming with images that are momentarily held at bay, but, by 1976, a slight sense of desperate impulses had been resolved, so that his prints became a little more relaxed and celebratory.

On the Heels of the Poltergeist (1976, x/20), is a harmonising mandala, and parts of Public Fountain no 3 (1976, x/20), are positively playful.

His contribution to printmaking is a welding of technique and symbol in an organic generation.

The seed of the process of creation is to be found in each print and the antithesis between imagination and reality variously attains an harmonious resolution.

Elwyn Lynn, Curator, Power Gallery of Contemporary Art, The University of Sydney, Australia