detail: A Person Looks At A Work of Art/someone looks at something..., c. 1975
watercolour and ink on paper
1 work at 24 x 70.5 cm (image); 6 works at 24.5 x 18 cm (image)
SOLD
Provenance
The artist
Purchased directly from the artist by Dr Colin Laverty in November 1975, with the exception of the last work which was a gift from the artist to Colin.
There are 7 images all together, please email me to view all 7
Peter Tyndall’s lifelong project has been the ironic deconstruction of art in an age of mechanical and digital reproduction, mass consumerism and what the artist calls “the cult of art”. His work has been aptly described by Anneke Jaspers as the “programmatic analysis of the act of looking” in an “anti-aesthetic approach to painting” (‘Art of the Second Degree’ in Pop to Popism, 2014, pp. 234, 236). But his wry, playful works also explore a deeper spiritualism derived as much from Buddhist or Christian theology as they are from a secular interrogation of modern idols in popular culture.
All of Tyndall’s work share the manifold title – ‘detail / A Person Looks At A Work Of Art / someone looks at something…’ – which critiques the influence of a passive viewing audience. His work questions the way our gaze is manipulated and directed by all manner of societal or visual forces. These works from the 1970s in particular focus on the academised brand of conceptual art emerging out of postmodernism and Pop Art. All the works bear a stamp from the “Fosterville Institute of Applied and Progressive Cultural Experience”, a faux institution of Tyndall’s creation which plays on the trite appellations and euphemisms used by art schools and galleries to sell themselves to the public. Reduced to basic geometric shapes and colours in ink and pencil, the works poke fun at the deification of artists, especially the reductionist, minimalist aesthetic that thrived at the time they were made.
